Weekend consumption

1. At Eckerds checkout on Saturday, I marvelled at Eckerds the $21.99 DVD of an Ashton Kutcher/Amanda Peet vehicle. Who would buy that stupid movie at such a high-price? I asked myself. Then my eye alighted upon a $2.48 price tag on the Greatest Hits of Curtis Mayfield CD. Instinct took over, and soon I was driving off listening to "Freddie's Dead." The Mayfield ouvre, it seems, is not but so deep. But at that price point, it need not be.
   
   
2. Memories of Murder. A 2003 South Korean flick that just needs to be seen. A mystery, meta-thriller, period piece, with strong human interest and plenty of sense of humor. Maybe the first really "round" thriller, to paraphrase Forster, since The Usual Suspects. See it.
   
   
3. Having read an article about some sort of carcinogens released by non-stick pans cooking at high temperatures without food in them, i.e. warming up, Mary issued an edict to transition the household to a strict regimen of stainless steel cookery. This, of course, means more oil in the pan. So everything, from boca burger to salmon burger, came out tasting extra swell, extra virtuous. I'm all for it.
   
   
4. Cook-out for neighbors on Labor Day proper resulted in no net diminution of beers in the house. Still 3 Dos Equises lingering from the Christmas Party. Discussion of these beers at Stacy and Eldar's pre-K get-together yesterday focused on the question of skunky beer: a reality or just a marketing ploy? Preliminary research shows that, while skunky beer does exist, its risk is generally mitigated through the use of opaque or semi-opaque (green, brown glass) containers.
   

No baby kisser he

Saturday -- Great footage of Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, hero of the hour. Handed a baby, he scarcely looks at it as a soldier puts a baseball cap on it, hands it to an enlisted man, and keeps walking.

I mean, who can blame the guy. He's a military guy, not someone running for elected office. He's not trained at handling babies. But why are they putting him through baby-holding photo ops?

He looks a lot like Cab Calloway, also not a big baby holder.

But seriously, there's a shit flying about who's at fault, who was late to respond, why wasn't risk managed better up front, etc. Aside from a few specific questions like everybody knowing the levees were insufficient and FEMA getting eviscerated by being folded into Homeland Security, it ain't simple. It's not the kind of problem you can just throw dollars at.

Maybe what's gonna happen is that, after major crises every couple of years. (9/11, Anthrax scare, 2003 Blackout, Ivan and his siblings in Florida, Katrina), disaster and crisis management will become more of a prestigious and better remunerated occupation, and more management talent will gravitate towards it, so better solutions will be found.

The Mouse that Roared

And here's Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, musing on the efficacy of seceding from the United States in order to get some aid money. That's logic straight out of Peter Sellers' classic The Mouse that Roared, in which the Duchy of Grand Fenwyck, upon learning of the Marshall Plan, decides to attack the US in order to lose and, therefore, get some development money.

Katrina and housing bubble

How will it pan out?
How much pressure on supply side? (people needing to be housed)
How much will insurance money prop up builders and contractors whose market might otherwise have abated as bubble popped?
How will P & C premiums be impacted?
How much mortgage default will we see?
How will defaulted mortgage-backeds impact yield curve?

How will monetary policy be impacted?
Deferred or reversed rate hikes?
(Will Greenspan stay on 6 months more?)
How will total carrying cost of housing be impacted?
Probably we'll see a regression to mean ratio of cost of renting to earning?

How will federal goverment finance the ca. $75 bln dollars not covered by insurance?
More of the long bond?
Repeal of provisional Bush tax code line items?
(Estate tax a likely and easy target in class warfare environment)

How will Chinese treasury view additional US debt in an oil shock environment?

One thing's for certain, it won't be solved with a telethon.

More than 9/11, this is the big test of our systemic risk management.
At least unemployment and corporate profit trends are better going into this than they were 4 years ago.
Ironically, one of the big saving graces for the US economy now vs. then is that more services have been offshored to India, etc. That's one big business continuity plan. Healthy redundancy
And Sarbanes-Oxley and Spitzer, for all their occasional excesses, decrease the probability of a bunch of Enrons and Worldcoms riding on the coattails of this. We hope.

A few points about New Orleans

1. The collapse of rule of law in New Orleans, which gains credibility as the hours pass, is as strong an argument for gun control as we'll ever see. And we hear of morons in Baton Rouge rushing out to buy guns to protect themselves.
2. Aaron Brown terms New Orleans the first big crisis for Homeland Security. What about the August, 2003 blackout? That was no joke. Not that anything's ever been done about it. That was forgotten quickly. Until next time.
3. The big problem? Why were people living there if it's so utterly below sea level? Those levees are prima facie ridiculous. This is a dress rehearsal for rising sea levels as the polar caps recede. Mardi Gras beads my ass. New Orleans shouldn't be repopulated to the same extent.
4. We're seeing a lot of fat people out there. The urban poor are the most grotesque, but look at those relief workers. You wonder how long they can hold up in the heat. One rarely sees this broad of a cross-section of Americans on TV. The obesity epidemic is for real.
   
   I know, I know. I'm one to talk. But my BMI is only marginally on the high side.

Jesse Jackson in New Orleans on Larry King

In typical fashion, Jesse Jackson comes on and makes one good point: that the post-Katrina news is overly focused on the Heart of Darkness aspects of the onetime Big Easy, when mostly there's suffering. And then he turns around and calls the oil-price gougers in Atlanta the real thiefs. Like I give a flying fuck about some Atlanta commuters. Let em carpool or telecommute, or pony up the dough. That's not the main story.

Jackson, as ever, shows himself to be a strange cross between a decent human being and and utter demagogue.

nb. Larry also talked lots of self-serving white politicians. Bill Frist is all proud that they're allocating big money for relief. As if anybody is surprised that a W administration can rack up a deficit. All kinds of deficits. We know that. Of course we're gonna pay for aid.

I'm surprised the thumpers haven't moved in yet with free bibles.

To read or not to read

I wonder what is the evolutionary basis for the guilt one feels when around the house alone with one's kids. On the one hand, if they're quiet and/or entertaining themselves, I want to leave them alone in expectation of the next time they get in a fight or come begging for attention. It's good for them to be happy on their own. Have a little precious time to myself. Read. Blog. Clean. On the other, I feel like I'm away a lot and therefore should spend time with them.

I suspect many non-psychopathic parents no what I'm talking about. It's pretty common.

NPRukidding

As I listened in the car today, NPR discussion of rising oil prices pivoted quickly from an insightful discussion of Indonesia's extremely high oil subsidies to a story about how to beat the high cost of oil: live the old-fashioned way. Like some woman in isolated Western Wales, where they learn the old ways of laying hedges, building rock walls, and -- get this -- making yurts. That'll teach them Arabs.

And then back to somewhat interesting discussion of the Manhattan DA race, although all ranging around the question: is it Agism to oppose an 86-year old who's been in office for 30 years? The first instinct is to look for a victim.

And yet, NPR's the only choice, the only place you've got reasonable odds of intelligent discussion of anything. Or maybe that Al Franken channel. Haven't tuned in to that yet.

Approaching storm

No. Not Katrina. After spotting some pencil marks on the wall last night, I asked Natalie where they came from. "Graham" she says. They were just ill-formed enough that it wasn't inconceivable that he could have made them.

Tonight, two big well-articulated drawings. Only she could have made them. Hauled from bed, she admitted guilt, and awaits sentencing tomorrow. The judge is considering the sentence as we speak, loathe though she is to take away the things that let her get through the day.

What's up? Is Natalie freaking out about the onset of kindergarten? Or is her stubborness just reaching new heights?

Needle mark, and then some

I've still got a bruise on my arm from where the guy drew blood weeks ago for cholesterol tests. The doctor already called me back with results (HDL still marginally low, up dosage of Niacin, all else fine). I think this speaks, more than anything, to the momentary robustness of the job market in the area. They'll hire anybody to work in the phleb lab, including the very fat of finger.

In other news, dodged a bullet this week with the old Subaru. It was sounding a bit rough, and then got worse, and it turns out it needed.... oil! Had run pretty low. Not dry, apparently, but low. Guys were laughing at me, telling me it would surely cost me a grand any time oil got low enough to be detectable to the naked ear. I used to check it frequently, I did, but then the aptly-named dipstick kept giving me unreliable readings, so I stopped doing anything between oil changes. I guess I'll have to go back to being a little bit more viligant (as W would have me say).

My luck, the grand's worth of work will become apparent this week, almost on account of this blog.

Falafelteria, 48th St between 5th & 6th, 1:15 pm

At the mouth of the arcade of jewellers which runs through to the real Jewelry Block, where we bought plain gold wedding bands lo those many years ago, stands a Falafel booth, glatt kosher, natch.

Standing in line, a woman comes forward to survey the bill of fare. Tight lime green shirt with lace around the edge. Sailor's capris (or something). Way pointy bright yellow low heels. Outrageous two tone green and purple eye makeup. Could be one (or two) of two things: prostitute or Russian. The Aeroflot glasses-holding string around the neck seals the deal: Russian.

She and a less-atrociously made-up girlfriend natter in Russian about the "salatiki" and the price. "It's real tasty," I tell em, in their own idiom. "Tasty?" says one, by no means surprised to be speaking Russian on the street. That's all they wanted to do with me.

They must have run out of Israeli guys behind the counter, because a friendly hispanic woman made me my falafel. Forgot to put hot sauce on, bummer. But pickles still mighty tasty.

Basketbe-all

In Wellesley the other day, I shot around a bit in the driveway with my nephew Daniel. He’s a tall, lean kid, coping with what they’ve diagnosed as Asperger’s, which in my day would have been termed introversion or shyness. Ball is not his #1 sport, but he’s got a good quality goal out there and his instinct is to shoot. So he dribbles a little and shoots, like most kids, concentrating on shots long and flashy. Takes me back.

Sometimes I think PhD in Russian is the best evidence of my contrarianism, but in some ways it’s even odder that I drove myself so hard to become good in basketball, for no good reason, and never quite got there. Sometime in junior high school, back in the days of Worthy-Perkins-and-Jordan (chronologically), I decided that being a skinny white soccer boy just didn’t cut it. It being North Carolina, I needed to get some respect on the basketball court. So time and again and again I forced my way onto the court at lunch, sometimes the only white guy, almost always the worst person on the court. I usually got the ball when I rebounded it or stole it. “Pass the ball over here, soccer boy,” I would hear, but I payed them as little mind as I could, just concentrated on the basics: box out, set picks, play D, slap backboard on layups.

On Friday nights, I often went to the gym and shot free throws, which is ridiculous, because nobody shoots free throws in pick-up and I knew I wasn’t ever gonna play organized ball. I think it was straight purism: I just wanted to shoot them well.

Not that it ever did much good. I was fast, I could jump, but poor fine motor skills made me a bad shot, and not having dribbled for hours a day during childhood left me without a good handle. So why did I do it? Why did I care so much about developing a skill of value to none and gain the validation of a quasi-literate underclass? Most of the soccer team didn’t bother. None of the cross-country team did.

Clearly I was driven by a general insecurity, a need to curry favor far and wide, of which I’ve written elsewhere on the Grouse. But also a general desire to fuck with peoples’ heads, to be the validectorian who could dunk and do bong hits. The latter, at least, I mastered.

Reverse Commute, Stamford Local, 5:30 PM, Pelham

Not surprisingly, when you think of it, the reverse commute train is populated by a substantial plurality of Mexican guys who were landscaping or doing construction out in Westchester. I’ve seen this reverse commute with Caribbean and Latina women coming back from cleaning houses in Bergen County, NJ, back when I was tutoring those Orthodox kids whose dad worked for Edward Safra back in ’97. But you forget about it, this daily shipping of people of color to the suburbs.

At Pelham, two Mexican guys who looked to be shit out of luck broke into a flat out sprint to make the train.

A strikingly expensive new apartment building, for the locale, loomed across the street from the trestle. A candy-assed turn of the century fantasy with minty green trim. But for the latter, would have been cool.

Blahhhg

Today drove from Wellesley to Larchmont. Didn't see much. Natalie seems focused on messing with Graham's developing little head by singing the ABC song and other classics in disruptive and non-standard ways. Walking around Larchmont later struck by the incredible amount of money and effort people will go to put additions on and re-landscape total frickin mansions. One household literally moved a pool it just put in a couple of years ago. "Honey, you know, I really don't like where the pool is. Could we stick it over there?"

Excited about getting to bed to read in Vanity Fair about some bigwig from Lazard Freres who got capped in Geneva while wearing a skin-colored latex suit.

I-84, Connecticut

Driving from NJ to Boston, the eternal question, take the Merritt or 684 to 84. Despite the fact that I always run into trouble between Danbury and Waterbury due to a long-running construction project, despite the fact that the Merritt has been one of the pretty roads qua road in America since the time of its building (see how Siegfried Gideon sung its praises as a utopian project in his 1941 classic Space, Time, and Architecture), I so often take the 84s because they're a 65 mph road and the Merritt has its own set of issues (all too often traffic slows down because cops have pulled David Letterman over for speeding).

Silly me. There's always trouble between Danbury and Waterbury. For what? We breezed across the GWB, up the West Side Highway, through the Bronx and Westchester -- through New York City, dammit, and then get hung up in the middle of nowhere.

Connecticut is as multi-personality (I hate the mis-overuse of "schizophrenic") a state as you can get. The Danbury rest area is pure upper crust Connecticut. Lots of Mercedeses. It has its own rock wall, for Christ's sake. By one pretty large, very climbable rock is a sign: "No climbing on objects." Clearly it refers to the rock. Presumably the sign-makers thought that by saying "objects" they could dissuade climbers from getting on the water fountains and picnic tables. No luck. Natalie and I climbed up on one of the latter until Mary told us to get down so Graham wouldn't get ideas. And we were having such fun.

Oh yes, Connecticut and MPD. At a gas station near Meriden, lots of Firebirds and big hair. A bathroom like a war zone. Maybe we don't see it in Princeton, but anecdotally I feel like there's more vestigial Springsteen culture in Connecticut than in NJ. In the Garden State, it feels like more of that has been shunted aside by Asian and Hispanic immigrants. Which is fine by me. They bring better food, better attitudes.

Mack the Tasty Ham

Tuned into channel 13, and here's this guy who's like a cross between Dean Martin and Andy Kaufman doing a groovy cover of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" backed by a band on a shiny bandstand. Early 70s, clearly.

It's Bobby Darin, performing for a audience of bouffantes and blue hairs, but he's actually good, if cover-focused. You can see where Kevin Spacey would be into him, with that disdainful look on his face that seems to expect a woman to hand him a drink and give him a blowjob right when he walks off stage.

Half of me wants to get a record, half of me fears it'll suck. But the guy had both pipes and talent.

March of the Penguins

To beat the heat over the weekend, took Natalie for only her 2nd (yes I know we're pathetic) trip to the cinema. Penguins do the craziest things. A lovely movie, powerful visually and thematically.

The craziest things, I tell you. Mating in the same place each year in the middle of nowhere. The dads standing on them eggs through that crazy cold while the moms run off and swim and feast, and then switching roles. Come end of winter, sayonara. So monogamous, so polygamous.

The movie manages to touch on many a great cycle of nature dramatic moments. "How like us they are, while at once so like cartoons," it seems to say. But, of course, they don't bring in the ever avuncular Morgan Freeman to narrate a film about molluscs, now do they.

But do see it. The dudes abide.

Da Vinci Kodak moment

Sony Pictures is apparently concerned that Christians will be offended by the central premise of the Da Vinci Code which it has hired the venerable Ron Howard/Tom Hanks team to bring to life. The novel's plot involved a long-running Catholic conspiracy to conceal the fact the Jesus boned Mary Magdalene and sired a kid by her, who was supposed to inherit his mojo or something. Apparently Sony is attempting to make this premise "more ambiguous" (I always thought pregnancy, if not paternity, was a pretty binary thing).

What are they afraid of? Didn't 36 million copies of the book sell? That shows some marketing potential. Do they fear that the thumpers' widespread preference for a literal interpretation of the Bible means that Christians think all books are literally true? Or that media concerning Jesus that are? The threat to the Bible's literal truth posed by a work of adventure fiction is similar to the threat posed to the sanctimony of marriage by some gay nuptials: it's all about the inherent insecurities of the besieged.

Or perhaps they fear that the mesmerizing artistry of Howard (the erstwhile "little Opie Cunningham") and Hanks, who once conviced many that Darryl Hannah was really a mermaid.

The two faces of Michael Milken

Just finished James Marshall's Den of Thieves, which chronicles the insider trading scandals of the 80s that had Michael Milken at their center. As I read the book, which depicted Milken as a voracious, mendacious, controlling paranoiac who one year grossed $550 million for himself but still wasted hours haggling over twenty grand, I thought: this doesn't quite jibe with another Michael Milken I've read about.

So I went back and tracked down Keith Ferrazzi's mega-bestseller Never Eat Alone, in which he gives a fluff job to the man he can scarcely hold himself back from calling "Mikey." (As in "Let Mikey try it, he'll eat anything."). Here's the pearl of wisdom Mikey shares with Keith: "There are three things in the world that engender deep emotional bonds between people. They are health, wealth, and children." I guess that's what Milken had on his mind when he wrote volumes on how to commit new securities frauds back in the eighties.

So which is the true face of Milken? That of the hard-nosed financier ready to rape anybody for a nickel? Or the air-brushed version his legions of flacks would concoct to approximate him to his eternally bemused doppelganger, Ted Danson.

You be the judge. Me, I always figured that capital punishment should be reserved for crimes of capital.

24 is, like, 16 too many

Alright. Mary and I have dutifully slogged through the first season of 24 over the last month or two. This show -- which has so profited by the release of serial DVDs, is ridiculous. (I've removed a number of plot details upon which I earlier commented so as not to offend people who haven't watched the show. Suffice it to say that the complex plot doesn't hold together internally. Stuff in the first half contradicts stuff in the second half.) I'm sorry, this is a show that seeks to survive purely on plot and surprise as technique, like trompe l'oeil painting. And it's also got some Russ Meyeresque cleavage to balance out skinny chicks.

Still, I'm sure we'll eventually watch season 2 because there aren't enough good movies to rent and Netflix's catalog and search interface suck so bad. You would think Netflix might be good, but it ain't.

Things I saw while out Running

• Old Lady with small dog, poop in bag, crosses street to pick up styrofoam cup of water, tip it out into street, and leave it there. What, did she think the stagnant water would breed mosquitos? If she lives near there, why not pick up the cup? If she doesn't, why does she care? Surely a bitch.
• Mint condition ca 1973 Blue and White Ford Maverick. I've been seeing this car around for years. Who would think to preserve such a vehicle? Sumptuous curves. A perverse classic.

Battery dying

Forgot my cord at work before running out to client meeting, and blew all my power on, you guessed it, work. What are you gonna do? Didn't see anything interesting or have any thoughts to speak of today anyway.

Momento McGreevey

So I'm at the doctor this morning for some blood work, and after waiting for 45 minutes for the nominally first drawing of the day, they finally take me back. And I'm pissed.

So I lean back in the grey Naugahyde chair and look up at the wall, and there, amidst insurance notifications and various public health detritus, in a small wood frame, held up by blue thumbtacks, is a picture you don't expect to see in a place of honor.

Governor James McGreevey announces to the world that he is "A gay American," flanked by his well-accessorized Courtney Love-looking wife #2.

What in the world would make someone memorialize this moment? It was a normal moment of shame for New Jersey, a typical revelation of corruption, wrapped up in homo-scandal. Is McGreevey perhaps a cult figure in the gay community for ascending to such a position of power? Is McGreevey the next Barney Frank? He's certainly a good deal cuter, that must be said.

Anyhow. It was wierd.

Bad moments in me -- Fire Island, 1995

A number of earlier posts have focused on events in my life which either aggrandize or dramatize me. As a counterweight, here begins a series of looks back at things I'd love to forget, if only. Perhaps the blog will help me forget.

It was a summer of love. Mary and I got together at the tail end of winter, and quickly it became apparent that what I needed to do was sublet my apartment and stay in her studio in the village so as to generate cash to put towards a house rental share on Fire Island, without working for money (I needed to pass my written exams to progress towards the M.Phil. glimmering on the horizon). It worked just fine. 2 Grand was just what we needed to secure a one of four bedrooms, one week a month, in Fair Harbor.

We took Mary's Collie-Shepherd mix Story with us. Why they let us rent the house with a dog, I don't know. It was prior to the tech stock boom, so rental markets dictated it, I reckon. Why our housemates put up with him, I don't know. In the evenings, story would often slip off the deck and chase deer through the grassy areas between the boardwalks of Fair Harbor. We would throw a tennis ball for him in the water of the sound, and he'd swim out to get it, and pounce on the ball demonstratively at the last minute to let it know who was boss. When other dogs walked by, he barked.

So one day we were out on the beach. We took plastic bags to the beach to pick up Story's poop. He'd get kind of hot and restive on the beach, when we weren't throwing the frisbee for him. One day, he must have gone a couple of times, so I must have been out of plastic bags. Then he must have gotten barky, so I took him for another walk along the shoreline, sans bags. This is a NYC-area beach, probably weekend, July, pretty crowded. Where water meets the shore, right by a woman in a squat chair, Story squats down. As usual, the 3rd dump of the day is not well-formed. A wave was approaching. I couldn't let it float out to sea. I couldn't pick it up. I stomped on it with my bare foot. Into the sand. It was squishy. What else could I do? The squat chair woman said "That's disgusting."

Filled with shame, I jerked Story around and went back to where our towels were. And told everyone. It was disgusting.

Let us never speak of it again.

Young Irony

Getting dressed upstairs I hear Natalie say "Give me my breakfast, please", and then, after ten seconds maybe, "Give me my breakfast, please." So she's showing us she knows when to use the word please, but her tone of voice tells us that she doesn't really know how to use it in earnest. She's saying it because she associates it with certain behaviors on our part, but she's saying it in a special, ironic way. She knows she doesn't really mean it, she just wants what it gets.

How do kids learn irony? From me and Mary carping at each other like siblings all the time? From us spelling out the words "we don't want them to understand," as the song would have it. She knows what's going on when we stumble in French with one another, and doesn't really tolerate it.

What does "please" mean if it's compelled? And when is it not compelled? I'm not sure one really gets the gut meaning of niceties until one is much older, at which point in time they're fully internalized. Which underscores the link Marxist theory has always posited between irony, manners and ideology. Irony and manners are different manifestations of doing something you don't really believe in, and ideology is a systemic instantiation of both. Only after the youth gets beat out of you does culture really feel natural, when it is in fact an overcoming of nature.

Upcoming: Bad Moments in me: concerning dog shit

"Ken Mehlman is gay"

Actual Google results
"Ken Mehlman" 205,000 hits
"Ken Mehlman is gay" 39,200
"Ken Mehlman is not gay" 64, all of them seemingly citing a single utterance

Is the RNC National Chairman gay, or is he just a smug, evil bastard? The results are in, and seem to indicate that he's both. I think the numbers pretty well speak for themselves.

This is obviously not a chamber topic like the preferences of your odd Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman, or the historical predilections for small rodent insertion of Richard Gere, or the genital composition of Jamie Lee Curtis (by the way, her children's books are damned good, if PC). If Mehlman is gay, as he should feel free to be in this great liberty-loving land in which we all live so freely, then he should be pummelled mercilessly for being affiliated with the most nominally homo-averse party in recent memory.

While there's really not a whole lot one can say about this topic save that it's not all that shocking, it's the kind of thing that makes you want to spring out of bed in the morning and blog.

Bad blog day

Worked all day today. Worked.

Meetings. Showing people stuff. Nosing through data. Sucks.

Blog suffered. Could be a continuing trend. Must start splitting time between Wall Street and Princeton hedge fund. Then again, as I've said before, the commute is good for the blog, introduces a welcome element of randomness to the day that's good for narrative. And I guess I can write on the train and post later.

Hiring frees, oder Arbeit macht frei

My employer, Princeton Consultants, has once more embarked on a bulking up phase. We've got more work than we can shake a stick at, and we're looking for smart youngish people who have either done some IT work or are open to the prospect of doing so. It's management consulting with heavy IT seasoning. Offices in Manhattan and Princeton.

We look for people who are very smart and swing both ways: management or IT. People with high SAT scores (yes, really) and fancy schools on their resumes (not necessarily, but good marketing), but no MBAs. It's a BA-PhD culture. Similar hiring profile to a DE Shaw or a McKinsey, but less arrogant and mellower.

It's a great place to jump from academia or college to the business world.

Know anyone who would be interested? Send them to me at ctroy@princeton.com. Not directly to the hiring manager. So I get my bonus.

Beignets from Butch

What does the Times bring us this morning but an article about shrimp okra beignets from Charleston, SC. Hams curing in the garage? 1968 Plymouth Barricuda? This could only be one person. The paper of record calls him Robert Stehling, but the cognoscenti will recognize him as Butch, who cut his teeth under Bill Neal at Crook's back in the southern part of heaven, once based operations out of a metallic blue Datsun pick-up, and fled Gotham in the mid-90s when he was running the kitchen at Home on Cornelia St, a place where many of us got our first taste of venison salami and where they were so starved for space that there were big ole heaters in the back garden so they could seat guests outside in winter. Greenpeace was loving that.

And now, Butch is kickin it at his own restaurant, Hominy Grill, down in the low country capital. You know what the grouse will chew if he gets down that way.

NY Times, A8, "Italians Say London Suspect Lacks Wide Terrorist Ties"

And here I had thought terrorists favored skinny, mod neckware, or perhaps a bolo on weekends. But the Italians, with their flare for haberdashery, would know.

Bad day

Almost first thing in the morning, Natalie throws up. Was it because her chicken nuggets were underdone last night? So I'm paranoid. I too had sampled them (to be sure they were done, to be sure, not because they are so organically juicy and succulent). So no swim lesson for her, another summer day at home.

At lunch, I dash through the public library, returning 15 books, checking out 13 plus the Platinum Edition of Snow White, which Natalie has seen only in snippets in the Disney Sing-a-long series. Grab a sandwich to split with Mary, rush home with my bootie. Mary and Graham come in out of the backyard and Mary tells me she's grazed her temple against rusty nails coming out of the shed, but believes Tetanus boosters to be good for 10 years (last one would have been '98, before heading to Russia).

Back at work, where I'm desperately needed cuz there's a release coming up rapidly, Hemant and Cyrus assure me that tetanus shots are good for only five years, and that Mary needs to go to the doctor. Meaning I need to go back home. Argghhhh.

And so I blog. Makes sense, no?

Expanding palette

In truth, Graham is beginning to broaden out his palette not just for the cupcake with sprinkles, but in many ways.

• After coming in from Maggie's playground today, he wanted watermelon before he wanted any of his traditional, limited range of foodstuffs (soy yogurt, turkey bologna, soy cheese, graham cracker [no pun intended] with soy cream cheese)
• He requested Disney Sing-a-long Songs rather than his earlier fixation Ralph's World for a video
• When reading stories before nap time, he accepted a number of stories I hadn't read him before without freaking out and begging for the story of the moment

In short, he's opening up.

And Natalie, after I stopped her from cheating while playing the game Memory and tried to get her to understand the strategy, came over and kissed me unsolicited on the arm. A rarity. Because of my somewhat tough love?

On the concept of dog, and other mysteries

It's hard sometimes to understand that abstraction and concreteness exist along a continuum. Is "dog" and abstract or concrete term? "Cocker Spaniel"? "Spot"?

How do toddlers so uncannily differentiate between dog and cat? How do they group Great Danes and toy breeds so effortlessly? I would think some dogs might look like cats to the young eye. Pugs, for example.

Milosz was having similar confusion when I busted him in Chapel Hill back in '89.

Graham, similarly, has an uncanny ability to differentiate junk food from other food. He eats a very restricted diet, and if you put something reasonably healthful in front of him he'll throw it on the floor. But potato chips, cupcakes, by God, he picks up the first one he sees in his life and mashes it into his mouth. How does he distinguish junk from healthful? Just by watching other kids? Was it the sprinkles?

One of the great mysteries.

Crunch time

I know it's boring to blog about work, but sometimes all you do is work, and now we've come to the point in a project where we go from "it's so cool that you're building a system to do that" to "Where can I do blah?" and "You've got blah base covered, right? Oh, I forgot to tell you about that didn't I?" And your mind races from

"How could we have missed that?" to
"How could those idiots have not told us that?" to
"It's normal for this stuff to come up" to
"We're gonna fall on our faces" to
"In this labor market, it doesn't really matter. There's plenty of jobs" to
"But what if the housing bubble pops?" to
"Shut up, brain."

Nothing stopped me from attending an exciting cruise yesterday on the Delaware River by Philadelphia at an industry event. The hedge fund nerds shared the boat with a group of court stenographers, who were very excited when the DJ set up and started in with a fine assortment of 70s classics. One 60-year old guy in T-shirt and shorts in particular was a dancing fool, and much the richer for it, cutting the rug with about 20 women at once, some of them passably attractive. They knocked back a mesmerizing funky chicken as we watched a nasty thunderstorm roll in from the north under the Betsy Ross bridge, only to mysteriously dissipate before it reached our boat.

Message in a bottle

Walking along the beach in Amagansett the other day, just West of the defunct fish factory. Saw a 16 oz. Poland Spring bottle with a piece of paper in it. Hmmmm, says I. Natalie will like. Pick it up. Take it home.

At home, with Natalie, I cut the bottle open. Inside we find a note which says:

My name is Nicholas. I'm 8 years old.
I wish all my family to be healthy and happy.
I wish to become a big toy maker when I grow up.
I wish to catch many fish today!
If you find this make a wish too!
It's a magic wish bottle!!!

Nicholas

I dunno. Seems a little pathetic to me. I wish my own family well. I hope I get things and you get things too. What about "my address is 29 Ronkonkoma Blvd," please be in contact? Wasn't that the whole deal with the message in a bottle genre? Establishing contact with the distant? Is this kid all Megan's lawed out?

I was deeply disappointed in Nicholas. Natalie listened to it once and walked away, forgot all about it.

Hamptons Beach photos

It's as Narcissistic a place as you'll ever see. Stayed in a nice house, with lovely white furniture and designer mayonnaise and all Williams Sonoma cutlery and so on. And coffee table books like "Hamptons Living" and "Hamptons Style", showing even more ornate houses, the kinds of houses our house aspired to be.

Beach pictures in the Hamptons are a genre of their own. It's always good-looking people standing on beach alone or in a pair at dusk with a drink. Self-adulatory, as in “Look, even Manhattanites can find the beach.” The relative emptiness of the beach says it all too, "We own the beach."

We went out to dinner. Our waiter was quite the piece of work, skilled with adjectives, nouns and verbs alike: "Would you care to sample a sparkling water this evening?" Or "the scallops present an especially pleasant alternative." I kid you not. The snapper was good.

Apologies

Apologies to all for the lack of content the last few days. I was out at the Hamptons, nosing around for the eternally elusive Alec Baldwin, who is reported to have been seen in the arms of Sharon Stone's cousin over a bed of arugula and heirloom tomatoes in a light plum vinaigrette. I'll try to catch up this week.

7/21/05 10:19 PM, Long Island Rail Road, Mastic-Shirley station

Heading to Amagansett to meet the family. Reading Dead Souls. Cackling uproariously as Nozdryov leads his brother-in-law and Chichikov around his estate to stall for time while his cooks get a half-assed dinner ready.

"They inspected the dogs whose haunches were so amazing, and they were very excellent dogs. Then they went to have a look at a Crimean bitch which was blind and, according to Nozdryov, would soon be dead, but which two years ago had been a very good bitch. They inspected the bitch and, to be sure, the bitch was blind."

My guffaw caused the guy across from me paying his bills (I took care of that in the morning) to look across at me one eye cocked up like Joe Flaherty. But, I mean, it's Nozdryov we're dealing with here. Here's what he says when he marches his guests across his puddle-ridden fields to show them the boundaries of his estate:

"This is the boundary. Everything you see on this side is mine and even on the other side too; all that forest which you see looking blue in the distance and everything beyond it is all mine."

So that's what boundary means. But seriously, you gotta love Nozdryov.

Am reading the Constance Garnett translation, the dog-eared Penguin I bought back in 1983, but just ordered up the new Robert Maguire version from Amazon. Lets see what the macho old queer can do with the great poet of Dikanka. I'll report back.

Six Sigma for the bench

Quick perusal of Times coverage indicates that maybe the guy could be worse: he's definitely corporate, and very revolving door. Rarely does one see so transparent an instance of putting one of "our guys" up on the bench. But from the bible thumping (henceforth let us return to our fall term"thumping") perspective he could be a lot worse. Or maybe he's just stealth.

He does continue to look a little too much like Dan Quayle, or just a purely generic midwesterner. It could be that nominating him or another like him is just meant to bring the perception of the court closer to the heartland. Instead of a big-dicked porn-loving black man, a fire-breathing Brooklyn-bred Italian intellectual, a New England momma's boy nerd, a spinster-looking Jewess... A man with a firm handshake and a steady putt, a Six Sigma justice.

Political text

I really should be blogging on politics. I used to, back in the Fall, then I got out of the habit. So here we go.

• Karl Rove. What a surprise. He looks evil. He gets evil things done. Now we find out he's actually been performing crimes. And I'm sure it'll roll right off his plump white butt. He'll get chased out of office and end up in some deep back room of the Republican establishment where there will be fewer controls on his Machiavellian machinations.
  
• Abramoff. Had never heard of the guy, but he's unmitigated evil.
• John Roberts. What a joke. I thought for a second it was Dan Quayle. He looks like the Southwestern SVP for sales. The least Supreme Court looking person I ever saw.

Generally speaking, I must say that I'm pretty defeatist at this point in time, even if the Times magazine detailed how a wacky Berkeley linguist has been able to on-board the Democratic Party to his theory of "framing" political discourse and the theory was used successfully in the filibuster and Social Security reform debates, I can't shake off the general feeling that we're surrounded by a bunch of smug suits and bible thumpers who are determined and empowered to do to America what they will, come what may.

All for Standards

I finished up loading the car up to go on vacation the week before last by putting my brand new $29.88 bike rack from our buddies in Bentonville, and found myself marvelling at the little metal things that you cinch down the straps with to hold the damned thing on the car. Such simple technology, so much buck bang.

And then I felt myself feeling warm, fuzzy feelings for the people that make standards for our products, culminating in the American National Standard Institute (ANSI). People get exercised all the time about the hot sweaty policemen, soldiers and firemen, heros. They are a fine lot for politicians to hold up as examples from the hustings.

But the nerds and bureacrats who make our standards get no recognition. Who sings hymns in praise of these uber-Dilberts? Think about what they do. They go to boring, oxygenless meeting after meeting after meeting building consensus around microscopic little features (thread size to the nanometer or some such), but once it's done, everything runs so smooth and cheap. It took Wall Street three years (1964 to 1967) to nail down the 12-digit code that we now call the CUSIP, but it's been doing just fine since then. Our whole economy is undergirded by a firm infrastructure of agreement. PPP, TCP/IP, HTML, 802.11.g anyone?

So we here at the Grouse raise a lukewarm diet Dr. Pepper to the not-so-evidently heroic people who slog away at our standards, whoever the hell they are.

Fat babies and seriousness

Plump children are regarded as a sign of affluence in China, and in other agrarian societies fat was also praised. After a week of Graham puking and not eating, now I get it. He's slimmer than before, not dangerously so, but enough.

I can look back at pictures of Graham on playground at South Bristol 12 days ago, there he is, plump and happy. Happy nothing, he's in ecstasy, rocking back and forth in that little fire chief convertible on springs.

And now, as I lay next to him on the couch after a 6AM puke, he stares at the ceiling, doesn't laugh at a rasberry to the belly, or peek-a-boo, or any of my best material. In some ways he's reminiscent of the all too serious, all too adult Christ on Mary's lap. You know: "I'd better have some of this breast. I've gotta expiate all the sins of the world." That kind of thing. Good work there Christ.

Blogito ergo sum

I must say

--what with it being the veritable mid-point of summer
and I'm sitting here in suit
and tie
and really need a haircut
and god knows if I'm going to be successful in fighting off this GI malady
which has so mysteriously beset Graham for a whole week
and may even account for Mary answering
neither the land line
nor her cell phone because she is, at long last, at the doctor's office--

I'm hot.

Apparently I'm not alone here, as people have been migrating from office to office in search of better AC. Lunch conversation focused on the thermostats in the individual offices? Are they real or are just palliative placebos? Let Dilbert be the judge.

Sometimes when I go through periods with nothing really to write about, I think of all the criticism of blogs, how self-indulgent and useless and onanistic they are. But that's what's interesting about them, after all, access to another's consciousness, as they say, surely not disintermediated in any given instance, but in aggregate, if you keep reading, you get there. Descartes was never quite sure about that, right: how do I know that moving body over there isn't really isn't really an automaton. Garden variety solipsists have the same thought by the dozens. Blogito ergo sum, says I.

Up at Canandaigua, I took down an odd volume of Thurber and read a couple of stories, and it occurred to me that so much of the New Yorker aesthetic (Thurber, Cheever, Updike, keep going) is really a predecessor to the Seinfeld premise of being "a show about nothing." In some sense, the craft of writing has often been seen as antithetical to narrative. The trick is to do something interesting on the page without describing much in the real world. My immense blog traffic, could be, bears me out. If not, fuck it.

Yelling and screaming, I'm all for it

After several days of post-nauseal languor, just laying around, sleeping, Graham has begun to take in calories again. He ate some toast, had some formula. And, as he's regained strength, he's once more found his vocal range, yelling and screaming for all he's worth. Pissy and ornery, as I'm sure anyone would be who hadn't eaten for three days and had been writhing around in pain, to the extent that one can even writhe. Mary, who spends more time with him, was less enthused about the screaming. But I ascribe to Leslie's words of wisdom "If they're screamin they're breathin." How true, how true.

Wail though he might, it was pretty hard to make him smile. "Wuzzah wuzzah" fell flat. Even Peek-a-boo fell on deaf eyes. So when, as I was leaving, Mary was reading him an airplane book and he was actually smiling, I must say it was pretty moving.

What a name

Out for a bike ride along Canandaigua Lake last week, I spotted a mailbox with the name "Ling S Ong" on it. I would have loved to have been that guy/gal in high school. I can just hear it now, people calling out "Ling, Ling S Ong, make it simple, to last your whole life long." Poor kid.

Bucknell 1962 yearbook

Amongst the many dusty books at the house on the hill where we stayed at Canandaigua was the Bucknell yearbook for 1962. It had some impossibly pretentious name that I'm ashamed to have forgotten. Granny glasses were totally in style for the girls, freakishly.

The posed fraternity group portraits said a lot about the era. There were maybe 12 frats, each with about 30-40 guys in them, arrayed in rows of six to eight. Clearly the instructions were: dark suits, white shirts, dark ties, face camera, feet apart, hands clasped together, left over right. As you paged from from to back through the year book, the degree of variance from this norm ramped up from about 2%: a few guys wore slightly lighter ties or hand folded right hand over left. From there it degenerates to houses where some joker has on, get this, white pants, sneakers, and an impish grin, or some frats where multiple guys appear to have on velour jackets or somesuch (these would appear to be scientists, homosexuals or other deviants).

Those were happy times.

Back'n badder

While it may not have been apparent to you, fair readers, I was out last week, off in the Finger Lakes region of what has been aptly termed the Empire State, as it branches out like a would-be Texas of the Northeast. Since our musty 1890s vacation home boasted only a rotary dial phone without even a cord to plug into my laptop, posts appeared courtesy of our San Francisco affiliate: the Pie.

And quite a vacation it was! Vomit, my friends, eight times. Twice from Natalie, including a 3am incident in which she came into our bedroom, informed us she was going to puke, had me hold her hair back as she bent over the toilet, and was very proud that she didn't get any on her nightgown. I too was proud. Graham, who clocked six upchuckings in the week, was not as refined. Poor little guy. With a stomach bug on top of food allergies and possibly reflux, he has more reason than most to just let loose.

But there was much more than nausea to this vacation. We had some good weather. There was cool mountain lake swimming, including by Natalie, who took to the water with increasing and encouraging relish as the week moved on. Mary hung with Kate. For me, Dead Souls during nap time. As good and wierd a book as it was when I met it in high school. And Graham showed that he could sing along to Sandra Boynton's new classic "Snuggle Puppy of mine," even when his stomach was getting ready to let loose half an hour later.

And now back at work. Like drinking from a Birmingham fire hose.

New Technologies (fuddy duddy rant)

Why didn't anybody tell me I needed to reprogram my cell phone or it would gradually drift away from the network?
Why didn't the directions on new phone batteries say to charge 'em for 10 hours? It's ridiculous, a crime even.

Everything comes with a manual the size of a novel these days, which is absurd. When I buy something, I'm looking to buy a thing, not a book. Given how tight my time is, if I'm gonna read a book, I want it to be edifying in some way, either entertaining or skill building. They need to do a better job with summary level instructions for people who don't want to use all the features.

Generally speaking, I could give a hoot about physical objects per se. If they have a lot of memories / narratives associated with them, that's one thing. The old horse head bottle opener we used to open Pepsis at my paternal grandmother's house (d. ca. 1981) before decanting them into frozen glasses she pulled from the freezer, now there's an object for you. I've got that one. My mountain bike, inherited from my dad's then girlfriend now second wife, the bike which got me around when the State of North Carolina repo'd my driver's license, now there's something. A phone battery or shiny new mountain bike can kiss my ass.

Sanitarpolizei, pt 2

So my train pulls into the the Zurich airport train station at 7 in the morning or some similarly ungodlily early time for someone of that age, and I stagger out, rather sweaty for having slept on Naugahyde all the long summer night with no sheets. So I look for a place to change.

A bathroom. I find one in the glimmering underground mall at the airport, so bedazzling to my young Europhile eyes. And it's a clean bathroom, you can bet, cuz its Switzerland and you know very well that they're got a middle-aged woman in a severe white nurse-like uniform collecting 50 centimes (ca. 33 c) and directing you to a stall of her choice.

So I squeeze into this exemplary toilet space, plunk down my bag and -- figuring that having paid so much money I needn't rush -- open my bag and start changing my clothes to get ready for a long transcontinental flight. I get my pants changed alright, am pulling on my shirt, when there's a knock on the stall. I ignore it. Another, accompanied by a muffled voice like the adult voice from Peanuts. Ignore. Finally, I see that the lock on the stall is being opened from outside. I'm getting mad, begin to curse. The door opens and this guy leans in with the left lapel of his clinical white smock, where there's a patch which reads: "Sanitarpolizei." He pushes the door open and I put my shirt on and push my bag out of the cell, by now cursing and livid. The Swiss stare.

What the hell was this cleanliness cop doing? At 7 am, was he so driven by a need to attest to the efficacy of the woman's stewardship that the had to check out literally every stall? Did he think I was a junky, shooting up in there? Who knows. In any case, there's only one word for it: Switzerland.

Sanitarpolizei, pt 1

It was August, 1988. For post-graduating fun, a summer of backpacking culminated in a week at a villa above Cortona rented by the mother of the now sadly no longer amongst us Sarah Pettit, with Sarah, her girlfriend Alexis, the scarcely imitable Roxana Tynan, and Sarah's mom and beer-loving brother Benj. With a swimming pool (the locals called the house la piscine) and much upper Appenines scenery, much fun was had.

But it only lasted for a week, and then I had to go back down the little old mountains and connect with the main train line headed north, through Milan, over the Alps to Zurich, whence I was fly back to RDU (via Washington National, since rebranded as Reagan Freedom International or somesuch hooey). At Milan, I had a couple of hours to gamble about, see the Duomo, and watch stylish youth with superfluous white sweaters tied about their necks eat panini, at that time an exotic term. At the station, I had my first ever risotto (also exotic), and you know it was good, if expensive.

Then I borded the trans-alpine overnight. It was one of the fine old long haul Eurotrains with compartments for four, with seats covered in Naugahyde or some morally superior European Naugahyde analog that folded together in the middle to resemble a bed. After a couple of beers and surely furrowing my brow over some smart guy book meant to impress intellectual chicks, I tried to go to sleep. As many of you may know, Naugahyde doesn't breath all that well, and so begins our adventure....

The Blog and the Novel

I've earlier declared my intent to use the blog as a place to gather content for a novel. But do I need to, or does that amount to thinking in terms of passe genre hierarchies?

The novel promises, to a certain extent, wholeness, roundness, totality. Some sorts of post-Aristotelian unities. The authorial or narratorial voice is supposed to wrap a world up, tie it with a bow and plunk it in front of the reader. However much the modernist and post-modernist novels may have struggled to twist and warp this paradigm, it remains in place.

And, in truth, the theory of the novel from Ian Watt to Lukacs to many a feminist has always relied upon the identification of reader, author, narrator, and character: one person sitting in a chair being communicated to by one person. Classically, ingesting the tale of another person following a similar path in life to that of the author. The 18th-century novel, some like to say, gave rise to bourgeois consciousness, which isn't far from the truth.

The blog, by contrast, is fragmentary and ongoing, rather than total. Viewed as a whole, a blog might undoubtedly look like a novel in diary form, a well known variant. There will be narrative structure and thematic consistency, and it's all held together by a single narratorial voice.

So why should I, and so many other middle aged people, care about writing a novel when I've already got a blog? Maybe because I've internalized the belief in totality and wholeness, because putting together an integrated piece of art has historically been, to some degree, validated as a worthy pursuit, a reasonable excuse for not having a job, while having a blog is social terra incognita. Uncharted coctail party waters.

New books from library

There's nothing quite like bringing a fresh stack of kids books home from the library. Natalie takes to it like a pig to shit. Only cuter.

All I've got to do is drop the books off up in "Granny's Room" on the second floor, and we've instantly got a measure of peace and quiet. Natalie runs up there, rifles through the bag, and leafs through them one by one. Full of glee. But then the tide turns. At some point in time, she decides that we actually need to read them to her. Graham's starting to appreciate the fresh ones too, after a long period of new book aversion (akin to new food aversion). For my part, given that I read the books every night, a new stack is like refreshing my life. I start to get excited about the uncharted stories towards the end of day at work.

Imagine how well this is gonna work when they start to read. We're not there just yet, although I half feel like we're neglecting Natalie by not pushing her to read more. Like a smart 5 year old really should be reading. But there's open warfare in pedagogical and child-rearing theory on the question of pushing kids, and Mary's both on the other side of the debate and more on top of it. Natalie will learn to read (or admit how much she knows already) soon enough, and our lives will be much easier. And then she won't be forced to memorize all her books.

Princeton Athletic fields, 6/30/05, 9:12pm

First Theo's bday party, then fireworks.

Early in the evening, yet another sign of aging. At Janet and Steve's, a lovely song on: "Oooh lady, won't you stay with me, just a little longer," and Gina and I are in the kitchen going, who is this? Violent Femmes or Velvet Underground? The former, it turns out, but it's odd how, at sufficient remove, 1986 sounds like 1970.

As we approach the fireworks on foot, other people are trying to park. Morons. Pushing through crowds of pedestrian children in Taurus wagons and SUVs, like you couldn't figure out that you need to park a few blocks away.

Fireworks
Oooo aaaah, and many variations thereupon. Sitting other dads and couples with 5 year old girls and two year old boys, which has worked out so curiously.

I had promised Natalie that she'd go to the fireworks when she was 5, and I was as good as my word, if not better. But now she's 5 and trending towards independence, and so didn't sit on my lap and gaze as beatifically and reverently at the many-colored explosions as the Hallmark cinematographer would have had her, but what are you gonna do.

Will fell asleep during the fireworks themselves. Natalie just got whiny and tired, and made me carry her almost all the way home: "but my legs have no energy, dad." And then, at home, a meltdown. Beads lost from necklace she had made at Nora's the other day. Not good. Not good at all. Tears and wailing, straight through to the pillow. Clearly, 10 really is too late.

Walmart. Trenton, NJ. 8:40 pm

Going to Walmart is most often like going to another dimension. The harsh fluorescent light and indefatigable search for the cheap make it feel like commodity porn. The many languages in use make it feel like America. In the best sense.

Got there within 20 minutes of closing, rushed to grab my few items (bike rack for me [29.88!], fire engine shaped electric toothbrush for Graham [$4.96 with batteries!]). Got right into line.

In front of me was a guy with a tattoo of a naked, big-titted Wonder Woman (could tell by tiara) on the inside of his forearm. The express line took forever. Aniela, at the cash register, couldn't for life of her figure out how to hand enter photos. Literally 10 minutes ringing up one thing. Everybody was getting angry and stood with their eyes trained on their feet or otherwise away from her, attempting to maintain stoic cool. But we were all there for the same reason: to shop as cheaply as possible, and we were getting what we paid for: bad service, drawn from the bottom of the labor pool.

And what's more, I had never seen a store where one could order McDonalds at the store register and pick up one's order on the way out. I passed.

Breakfast of Champions

In line in front of me at CVS on Saturday (buying Gatorade after being depleted of the 30-mile ride), a college girl with reddish alternative hair reached into the convenient and transparent mini-fridge to the right of the register and pulled out a four-pack of Red Bull ($7.89 for 4, a significant price break from $1.99 a pop). "Breakfast of champions," she said to the male she had in tow, "Red Bull and Fruit Loops." Then she looked over her shoulder at me, the square guy (I was actually dressed in my better shorts and a summer party shirt, the better to perhaps dazzle the Merrill Lynch dad to whose house I was going to pick up Natalie from a play date). As I was saying, she looked at the square guy to see if he would flinch at her radical, trangressive morning repast.

And, in truth, in my dehydrated state, I was a little disgusted. Even now, having just had a refreshing and delightful beverage, Red Bull and Fruit Loops doesn't sound like breakfast. But I remember pulling shit like that myself often, trying to impress people in public places with how cool and smart I was. It did me a world of good.

Fireflies

Sitting on the porch this evening reading the paper of record, I noticed that the fireflies were out in force. Though it was forty-five minutes after bed time, I tiptoed upstairs to see if Natalie, perchance, might be up with the near-solstice dusk. Even though she had refused to snuggle with me, a disturbing trend.

Was she up? You know she was, so I took her by the hand out to the back porch and we sat down and checked out all of the many many fireflies flitting around out in the back yard, over by Mary's flowers, and the great many who flew around across the fence in the bulldozed "contested zone," the big lot waiting for McMansions to be built, temporary home to backhoes and bulldozers (much to Graham's delight). And yes, you Manhattanite, California, and desert readers, the fireflies twinkled eat-your-hearts-out fine in the muggy aftermath of a summer storm.

Tour de Cure recap

So, like I said I would, I biked 30 miles in the hot hot New Jersey sun on Sunday, all in an effort to raise money for a diabetes cure. Ostensibly. Actually, like 21% of funds raised go to cure-oriented research, while greater than 50% go to public health initiatives. Not a problem, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and so on.

So you would think that the public health component would be at the forefront of this event. Fact is, I've never seen so much white flour and sugar dispensed at an athletic event. At the rest stops, where the ride literature had explicitly stated that there would be PowerAde, there was water, juice, and Fuze, a diet juice drink. And protein bars and bananas too. But no sports drinks, in 90 degree weather! And then at the last rest stop they had run out of water and volunteers were standing around, like: "Maybe we should go buy some more." You couldn't have bought an electrolyte at those rest stops. Some of the slower riders reportedly pulled in shakily depleted and had to drink Fuze. yick.

At the staging area, a yoinky, pasty DJ played bad music, while our host and sponsor Bristol Myers Squibb touted its mission "enhance and extend" human life, eerily echoing Microsoft's stated 2000-era goal to "embrace and extend" the internet. I guess that's what BMS was doing when it stuffed it's sales channels with billions in product back in 2001. Thanks!

The brochure touted a "healthy lunch". This translated into a dinky little ham and cheese wrap from Applebees bundled with some cheap chips. Would you hang your brand on that?

But it was a fine ride through some of the best scenery NJ has to offer. Good exercise. Great cause. Poorly done.

Bad Education

For its first half, this Almodovar film felt a little precious, a little too geared towards those in grad school, those wishing they were still in grad school, and those pretending they were still in grad school. All the internal intertextuality, the multiple intersecting layers of narrative, yatta yatta yatta. And, of course, this being Almodovar, the cute boys and hot action. I was kind of wishing we had sent the DVD back unwatched and gotten disc 3 of 24, season 1. More on the 24 phenomenon.

But Spain's perennial poet of the kinky and worse pulls it together in the second half of Bad Education, gives the tale a reason to be twisted, and gets closer to Hitchcock than most do these days. And in the end, for all the drag queen hookers, drugs, anal sex, bulging crotch shots, violent deaths, corrupt, perverted priests, and other Almodovar trappings, this movie is held together by the theme of lost love, of two young boys who love each other and are torn apart, but never forget. Which lends the allegorical setting of 1977 more poignance. This is perhaps Almodovar's Raisin in the Sun. What happens to a dream deferred?

Who the hell made The Usual Suspects and what are they up to now, anyway? I know I can look this up on the so-called internet. And I will, too.

Food hounds argue about meatballs

Last night at around 10, Mary accused me of having had more of the organic turkey meatballs than she had, which is absurd. At the early round of dinner with kids, we were each apportioned three. Mary had, indeed, put one off to the side and not eaten it together with her pasta, but afterwards, when she must have plucked it from the pan with the zucchini and ensnarfed in a certain number of rather pleasant bites. So when each of us had a pre-bedtime snack of a touch more pasta with meatball, she basically maintained that I served the meatballs cut up to disguise having taken more, momentarily forgetting about her earlier one. But I would never cheat her of her food like that.

Once, a few years ago, I ran out to Ace on Saturday morning to pick up some sort of hardward, I was listening to NPR and I heard a young woman tell about her family -- none of them slim -- and how they would eye each other suspiciously and territorially at the dinner table as each angled for the choicest morsels. She signed off Curtis Sittenfeld, and I'm thinking "Sittenfeld, Sittenfeld... I know that name." I get back the house and Mary's telling me about the thing she had just heard on NPR by the sister of her student Jo Sittenfeld. And we were both looking at each other like, "that's our house... and get your eyes off my sandwich."

And now Curtis is the author of the hot best-seller Prep, much to the consternation of certain Princeton-area novellists. And we'll never have her over for dinner, though we've got a Jo's portrait of her on our wall.

Team lunch

Kinda depressing when a team comes into a restaurant filled with other teams. Everybody sitting around in khakis making chitchat, trying not to speak of the matter at hand (shared work), but limited in the number of topics that can be touched otherwise (i.e. kids, sports, vacation, home improvement, current events [generalities] but not politics, religion, sex, money [particulars]). Everyone's there for the same reasons. Lunch food and retreat. The oasis in the middle of the often-depressing days of doing things you're not in control of. But the expectations placed on lunch can be burdensome. It doesn't really solve problems, it only defers them, and not even for very long or very effectively. But it's still better than a sandwich at your desk. Most of the time. Not to be confused with business lunch, when meeting with someone outside of your realm. That's fun, often even ascetic (one shouldn't be too concerned with food here).

One last chance to give me your money

Time's running out to sponsor me for the American Diabetes Association's Tour de Cure in Princeton this June 26, where I will be joining my colleagues Cyrus, Webb, and Gerry to ride 30 hilly miles in Princeton's arduous outback to raise money for diabetes research. I know it's not really much of a distance, but it's the thought that counts.

It's already a team effort. Webb cleaned up my bike real good, Cyrus lent me a bike rack. I've been riding.

There's still time to SPONSOR ME and help raise needed money for research. Suggested contribution is $20, though you may go crazy or sane as you wish.

Note how the South and North are vying for dominance among my supporters. Who will win?

Current sponsors Team
Me South-North
My mom South
Joshua Stein South
John Fox South
George Berridge Jr. North
Robert Crabill South
Niklaus "Boyzu" Steiner South
Hilary Jewett North

Verbal Commitments:
Felice Marantz and David Kamien North

Expense aversion asymmetry

It's a typical middle-class trait is to be willing to expend extraordinary amounts of energy and concentration on reducing costs, but not a commensurate amount of engergy on growing revenue-producing capacity. Drive to Costco, buy big lots, etc, without really calculating the costs (fuel, time, inventory management) associated with realizing these. People who bill at $60 an hour do work at home for which they could pay $20, because subbing it out seems haughty.

This is partly because spending is thought of as waste, and therefore to be controlled, while there's somethiing vaguely distasteful if not downright immoral (getting home late, neglecting kids) about working too hard to make money.

People will talk endlessly about how much money they save, it's a competitive sport, particularly amongst the ladies. But discussing how much you earn is greatly deprecated, it's just not done.

What it all adds up to is a lot of false economies: people work so hard at saving money that they don't learn to earn more, and net net it's counterproductive. And yeah, there's a moral component to it: reducing costs is aligned with environmental preservation, while making money correlates to consumption, which is destructive. But that's stupid. If you earn more, you can spend more on purchasing the same items at more expensive and more convenient stores. Or on more expensive items. The difference is that you develop earnings capacity rather than savings capacity.

I'm sure the behavioral economists have attacked this asymmetry, I just haven't read it. Shit, this is obvious to everyone.

Camp time

School's out, and now it's camp time, which, as we now have learned, is just another way to outsource child care. On the one hand.

On the other, looking down over Hamilton Street at the Y, I see bunches of campgoers clustered in the shade of the trees around the basketball court. It's a nice day, mild and breezy, they're having some kind of water-related fun. I assume there's some sense of wonder left to camp, even if there are no farm animals or their droppings or nice natural place to swim, the kind of stuff we took for granted back in the day.

And Natalie's off to kindergarten orientation this week. If they don't keep her out because of her now-abated encounter with Fifth's disease, or "Slapped-face syndrome," (no, I didn't) which Mary so adeptly diagnosed. They had better not. It be too sad to miss orientation. I'm excited already.

Tonight, more Mary Poppins.

IHOP, Boston Post Road

A mile or so from Mary's family's home, right on the Post Road, there is an International House of Pancakes. There it has sat for at least the 10 years I've been around, surely longer, with its bright blue roof, beckoning to passers-by with sirens of buttermilk, but never has a member of the Berridge household entered into it.

The little IHOP by the road has always intrigued me and on Sunday, Father's Day, Natalie and I put an end to this neglect. IHOP. Long the only restaurant that absolved its customers of the "eggs or pancakes" decision by just bringing you both. The first breakfast place I ever saw accepting credit cards (that would be ca. 1986, Newton, MA). Provider of silver dollar pancakes to little kids. Home of multiple flavors of syrup. A national, no, an international institution.

Sunday was no different. We got there at 8:30 or so, not too long before a line started forming. First impression upon sitting down in the booth, was that IHOP had engaged some consultants to use the space most efficiently, as the booth was mighty vertical and thrust me perilously close to the table. Sadly, they could not do chocolate chip silver dollars, but Natalie did not get worked up.

Looking around, I might never have guessed I was in fancy-pants Larchmont, NY. No, no, this was America. Hispanic families, black couples, a pair of young Indians and so on. There was an older black couple dressed for church, she in a red jacket and black blouse, he in a killer bright red pinstripe suit and a red bowler. I kid you not. It was beautiful. There was a cute little almost-one-year-old boy a hispanic family with an outrageously full reddish hed of hair, like an Afro, no, like Krusty the Klown. So much hair. And, yeah, there were some Larchmonty people too. IHOP was kickin. Service reflected the volume.

And then this WASP couple comes in, he in a canary Polo golf shirt, she in a shawl or some such. The hostess tried to seat them, but they wouldn't sit there because it was "disgusting," so they took another booth. Then, after not being served for maybe two minutes and muttering to each other excitedly, they got antsy and the guy stood up in the tight aisle and tried to make eye contact with a waitron, to demand service. The Indian guy sitting next to him smirked bemusedly as he forked his omelet, enjoying the difficulties of Mr. White Guy. In truth, it was fun. Hell, Natalie had been patient, why couldn't Mercedes man?

Some kind of snoozefest

To judge from the way the critics treated it, the Metallicumentary Some Kind of Monster was gonna be a groundbreaking film: all these hard-assed metal guys getting soft and vulnerable and revealing their innermost feelings. Well, if that's as deep as they get, that's pretty pathetic.

James Hetfield, in particularly, shows himself to be an object lesson in ossification, demonstrating that if Heavy Metal exists to voice desires and "thoughts" of teen boys, keeping at it into your 30s means that you have to continue on thinking and feeling at a teenager's level.

OK. It must be said that some of the other the guys in band were trying to make therapy work, that it did take some courage to let the band be filmed over such a long period of time, and that the therapist really did have some nice, cabled cotton sweaters, particularly the shocking canary yellow one.

And the Fan Appreciation Day scene where the woman in black leather wins the right to be the bass player for a day was totally, totally awesome.

Glamour mag's "shocking" Sex survey

What other people are doing in bed! Shocking!

Not.

"We usually do three positions: missionary, her on top, doggie style." Oh my God!!!!
"We like to get really sweaty and let it all hang loose." Wow!!!!
"I suck her toes." Excitement.

That was as wild as it got. I was expecting descriptive statistics. 22% like anal. 14% love thy neighbors%. 12% have oral sex in moving cars, etc. That's a survey in my book.

Thank God I didn't throw down ducats.

Novel fodder

A few weeks ago I was in my mom's boyfriend David Ontjes's house down in North Carolina, looking around. Like so many of our parent's houses, it's palpably waiting for kids to come home. It doesn't make sense to take care of that much house for one person, but it's so hard to let go of the past when it's so much of you. Pictures of people (Jason, Ethan, Sarah) I knew from high school, but not that well. Interesting to project backwards from present. And it's the same deal wherever I go, looking at houses of now grandparents, from Pittsburgh to Westchester to the Piedmont. If mom and David marry, they will likely kick loose of more of this retrospective orientation. Perhaps this is a benefit, if not an advantage, of recoupling in advanced years, rather than staying married.

And it made me realize not just that I want to write a novel eventually, but that the novel should be classical in form, organized around weddings, births, deaths, characters. Continue in the tradition of Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (if you haven't read it, read it!).

So I'm going to try to concentrate on characters and dialog here on the blog, which have always been my favorite posts. Of course, that means I have to get away from my desk and all my fancy pants Ivy League colleagues.

Rabies in Moscow

The Moscow Times last week reported on a rabies outbreak in the capital. OK, only three people have died, which isn't many for a country with precipitous and alarming mortality trends. Rumors that Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov had been bitten by a rapid cat at his dacha have not been confirmed. The government has also denied allegations that rabid animals were introduced into the jail cell of fallen Yukos magnate Mikhail Khodorkovskii while he watched the Russian Wheel of Fortune, though Amnesty International has registered a protest, particularly since the Championship round was on that week.

I wouldn't be all that surprised if, shades of the freakily scary 28 Days Later, a vaccine- and treatment-resistent form of rabies were to arise out of Russia, just like the super duper TB that's been coming out of Russia's jails. After all, estimates of the number of stray dogs in Moscow range up to 30,000. Here's what Pravda wrote in an article last October entitled "Mutant Stray Dogs Attack Muscovites":

Stray dogs killed a 54-year-old woman in January. They were dragging the woman's body along the vacant ground near the garbage-pressing station for a long while, tearing the body to pieces. Dogs usually choose solitary areas and passers-by for their attacks. As a rule, one dog, a so-called scout, approaches the victim at first, and then the whole pack attacks a person.

Veterinaries say that stray dogs in big cities have become much smarter animals. Big cities turn abandoned dogs into brutal, well-organized fighters. Only smartest and strongest animals can survive in a metropolitan city

But that's Pravda, a paper who has never seemed all that interested in journalistic integrity.

Natalie's up. Must make breakfast.

Of names and teeth

Discussing names with my rather commonly named colleague Steve Thomas, we stopped by the ever useful Social Security Administration Baby Names site. There we found that, as he suspected, Stephen in all of its canonical spellings has declined in popularity in recent years. And rightly so.

Natalie, on the other hand, continues to skyrocket, having reached #19 in 2004, up from #34 when ours was born lo those five years ago. And it was #5 in California last year, which I might consider to be a good thing if I were in marketing. It just goes to show you, you think you're being all smooth and distinctive and here comes the horde right behind you, sipping on Fruitalattes and dipping their wasabe infused french fries in free range olive oil. God how I hate that stuff.

And so, five years or so after birthing our Natalie goes to the dentist who tells us that her chipped front tooth is from grinding. Grinding. At the age of five. What's up with that? Am I so stressed out by the many charms of my wondrous career that I should be transferring stress to her so that she be grinds her teeth so? And now she doesn't want to snuggle half the time at nights after I read her and Graham books, and when she does, she doesn't even bother to lay on top of my back to stop me from getting up, and then demand that I tell her a magic phrase of her own concoction before she'll release me. And today is the last day of pre-school. These are indeed uncertain times...

Birthday Party #5

Natalie had birthday party number 5 yesterday, and while it was not as full-blooded an affair as numbers 1 and, say, 2, much fun was nonetheless had by all. Highpoints and "key learnings":

• Graham's first cupcake -- Graham, with his milk and egg allergies, doesn't have much food fun. He is, in fact, pretty much shy of new foods. However, somehow the chocolate cupcake with pink sprinkles called out to him and he just knew it had to be right, and he ate it down with no delay, his first big sugar delivery ever. And he deemed it good.
• All credit to Mary for her foresight in making the cupcakes and, indeed, the party, dairy and egg free. Where usually we're watching Graham like lactose-intolerant hawks, if occasionally insufficiently so, yesterday we had no need to worry.
  
• Don't overengineer. Although birthday parties at this age -- when more parents do the drop-off maneuver -- become exercises in potlatch childcare (you watch my kid today, and I'll watch yours a few months hence), you don't really need to schedule that intensely. 2 hours is not much time. Especially with a sprinkler.
  
• City boys add spice -- We were graced with the presence of the honorable Joseph R. Wolin of Manhattan, along with the dashing young Conrad Ventur. The party was measurably funner. Usually you see many of the same people on the birthday party circuit, with the inevitable plusses and minusses.
• Natalie is now 5.
  Pink and purple are still her favorite colors.
  She has not yet mastered the art of blowing out candles.
  

Bloody Passion guy

Plumped down in front of the telly last night to the charms of Mel Gibson's The Patriot. One thing we can say about Gibson is that his tastes don't waver much. Blood, gore, and righteousness. A TNT "New Classic," which isn't surprising in these years of Bush the Younger.

Beth worked on a movie with Gibson once and said that he was essentially generally obsessed with violence and maiming, that he was outraged that the studios had not let him film one particularly gruesome scene in Braveheart in which somebody's abdomen was split open and spilled out down onto the camera pointed up from below. I'm sure that, back in the day, he was a fan of Warhol's Frankenstein, home to scenes like that and such classic lines as: "One cannot know death until one has fucked life in the Gallbladder," uttered by our hero as he is doing, guess what? She also said Old Mad Max was really short and ugly with a big head.

Hence The Passion. Who better to bloody up than the savior himself. All that exposed skin is like a canvas for a blood artist.

Back to The Patriot, anyway. Rarely does one see a plot more loaded towards melodramatic
righteousness. The Brits kill two of his boys! They burn down a church full of his friends, including his boy's fresh little wife! So yeah, I sorta figured he'd want to kill that Redcoat baddie. But I don't want to spoil the ending for you....

The cinematography is good.

It's hot and muggy...

and I really don't feel like blogging today. Am cast today in the role of corporate whipping boy, supposed to be pushing a one of my client's partners into getting on board with our project. But the partner lacks motivation and staff to do so. What are we gonna do, move the book of business? Much much easier said than done.

So I've gotta be Mr. Corporate manipulator guy, simultaneously polite and firm, direct and twisted, with a remote party that really could care not much less. It's really not a role that comes naturally. Perhaps because I've so little taste for power, I'm not all that good at faking it.

I've similarly not mastered the role of disciplined parent. If Natalie pushes my buttons. I pretty reflexively either threaten to take something away from her and/or snap or yell. Not really the ideal thing to do, I know, but somehow I' m less good with the setting policy and stand by it thing. I guess I'll have to work on that more when she starts moving towards real trouble.

Junky chick on Franklin St

Whenever I'm in Chapel Hill I try to take a walk through town to see what's up: who's still in business, who's not, how it all smells. So Mary and I set out last weekend to take it all in, parking at the "old" public library, now the I'm-sure-hugely-successful Chapel Hill Museum which features a big smiling picture of, you guessed it, James Taylor! Whenever I see his smiling face... that's when I reach for my...

No but seriously. We trudged on passed the planetarium and all the flowers, passed Art Chansky's old bar which he sold to Woody Durham (yes kids, video did kill the radio star), passed any number of other nondescript student-oriented eateries and drinkeries, including He's Not Here, the bar which has historically supported my father.

And then we arrived at the more adult portion of Chapel Hill, the slope leading up from the old Hardee's (now Panera?) to the Carrboro border. Home of the Bookshop, the Cave, and restaurants where you can actually take a date, or your spouse, depending on life stage.

And in front of one such restaurant, now Panang, formerly Pyewacket, stood a young lady in a tank top and shorts. She seemed fit, which belied the tatoos all over her arms. And then she started scratching herself and jumping about, which corroborated the tattoos. And then she took off her shorts, which Mary later ID'd as underwear. And there she was, standing on the street with nothing but a tank top on, with her natural blonde pubic hair blowing in the wind. And she walked up and down the sidewalk, not particularly animated, not visibly trying to create a scandal, just naked from the waist down, enjoying some heroin. People came in and out of the restaurant, we called the cops, Mary was just shocked. By the time we came back around the block and looked down the street at her from Rosemary, she had some jeans on. The curtain had fallen on that little act.

We don't get much of that in Princeton.

A big day

Today is a huge day around our house. Natalie turns 5. Our marriage turns 8. And my sister gets to mark her own birthday by having passed through round 3 of chemo. Though she's still a fighting past the life-giving poisons coursing through her body.

It being hot, I decided to get a haircut, forgetting momentarily just how expensive the barbershop in the middle of Princeton is. After reading for a while about Pamela Anderson and her relationship to her nipples, I found myself seated in the chair of Aliya Verlasevic, who asked me where I was from before I could ask him. Turned out, he was from Bosnia, as I guessed, but his family now lived in Zagreb, Croatia. He termed himself a refugee, and after riffing on that subject for a while he told me about his haircutting experience: "As a boy, I almost cut Tito's hair," he tells me, "one day I just pick up scissors and start cutting. I cut Helmut Kohl's hair, here I cut the governor's, one time I cut Indira Gandhi's. For twenty-one years I been cutting hair." My hairs sense the presence of greatness, and are now shorter.

Construction boon

One of the little appreciated benefits of the real estate and construction boom of recent years is the abundance of porta potties available when you go out to walk, run or otherwise move about in suburban areas. This can be important for those of us who both do that and have feisty bladders.

But I have to be realistic about this. After all, as we all know, the boom in housing (and, therefore, the porta potty presence) is very interest-rate sensitive and, at present, we're at an unprecedented moment along the yield curve, with China and other emerging markets buying huge amounts of long-denominated US sovereign debt, making money and housing cheap for us. So what happens when China and South Korea start snapping up Euros, mortgage rates shoot up, the ARM-leveraged vacation home speculators get flushed out, and the bubbles bursts? Then where will I pee? Perhaps vacant, undeveloped lots will be left to reforest themselves, giving those in need desperately needed cover.

Tycoon (or Oligarch)

This 2002 Russian film starring Vladimir Mashkov could have been a great deal worse. Based loosely on the career of Boris Berezovsky, our oligarch has all the right stuff: with his PhD and piercing blue eyes, he bags the truly fine babes, thinks up schemes to defraud everybody and make big money, and drinks and roars. And he himself never orders anybody killed, which would not be comme il faut. The film, which takes its form from Citizen Kane, preserves some nice ambiguity to the end.

Oh sure, there's plenty of good old look at the crazy irrational Russians stuff. Like the time he sinks a boat for no reason at all. But, after all, that's how Russians are. Right?

In other news, lets all give a Russophile shout out to Uncle Kevin for providing me with this fine video tidbit from the German band Dzhingis Khan, a fine reminder to anyone who ever considered Europe more cultured than America that that opinion was never formed on the basis of pop music.

Cultural Awareness Day

Another of the tapes I found at Mom's said Anarchy in the PM on it, but in the documentary enthusiasm of those relatively early days of home recording I taped over it with the dulcet sounds of my band, the Unity Rockers, practicing in the rec room. That's right, the Unity Rockers, the only 13-piece all-white (no black people were listening to reggae at the high school then) reggae band in history. I hope.

And hearing us clunk through "Police and Thieves" brought back another fine memory. It was our senior year in high school, and as such we Unity Rockers were filled with a desire to spread culture throughout the school system, so we hied ourselves off to Phillips Junior High School and convinced the principle, the esteemed Herb Allred, that he should let us perform for his kids for a "Cultural Awareness Day" where we would teach them about reggae culture. Though we wouldn't say "jah" or "Rastafari" because we knew it was ridiculous for white suburban kids to be playin that.

So the big day came. To fit the whole school in we had to do two shows, one before lunch, one after. I think we lectured them a little about reggae, talked to them about 3-drop drumming or whatever you call it. But basically we knew little. And we played. I'm sure we were awesome.

One thing's for sure. Kids snuck out of class to see the second show. We were the big thing, for once! And who was the man, who got the girls screaming? Niklaus boyzu Steiner, that's who. Wearing a gaucho hat, marking the beat with his magic tambourine, toasting in Swiss-German like so few have since, he captivated the younguns fully. For a day, we were all stars, but Nick was the man.

Confusion in her eyes that says it all

At mom's house this weekend I spotted an old box on my shelf. "What's in there?" I thought. Tapes. Old tapes. Tapes as old as the one of the Cars' first two albums circa 1979.
And also some mysteriously labelled ones that once belonged to one of my mom's businesses but were repurposed when I got a stereo. With titles like "Bad Hits" and "Bad Hits II," surely they were worth a listen.

Mom's car stereo showed that they were tapes of Anarchy in the PM, WXYC's early punk and New Wave show. Seminal stuff. Old scratchy tapes with tunes from the likes of Rocky Erikson, Richard Lloyd, Iggy Pop, and so on. On Saturday nights I used to put on my big clunky headphones, sit in by big Swedish rust-colored chair and tape the show. It changed my life. This weekend I came upon one of the most life-changing moments of all: hearing Joy Division for the first time "She's Lost Control." Was it before Ian Curtis killed himself? I don't know, though I like to think so, but I had never heard anything like it, the funereal Moog, the impossibly low-tuned base, the mad depth of Curtis's range, singing about some girl on ludes or smack. It was at once raw and intensely crafted.

When, a year or so later, I spent the summer near Manchester and loitered with youth by the chip shops and in video parlors, hearing them talk about the impossibility of dreaming of a job. Then we raced one day from a field trip to the city because of hundreds of bobbies swarming the malls, shutting it down to prep for a race riot. Pre-Volcker, pre-Thatcher, this was the time of Joy Division.

And then, a year later, in Honolulu, I read that mourning had run its course and the remaining band members had reformed as New Order, and their first EP release turned out to be a classic: "Oh you've got green eyes, oh you've got grey eyes, oh you've got blue eyes." And then those ever softening New Orderites remixed it in the 90s and made it safe to be made into a soundtrack for the Gap. Thanks. I'd give several teeth for a clean copy of the original.