Here is a long-delayed capsule recap of our most popular feature*, Minor Celebrity Sighting Round-up. What have people you've kind-of heard of once someone describes them to you been doing with their spare time?

ITEM: I saw the guy that plays Artie Buco on The Sopranos walking down 7th Avenue one evening. He looked to be in good spirits while walking somewhere.

ITEM: I was going to some hoity-toity Comic Book party in Midtown when I thought I saw local talk-show legend Joe Franklin walking hurriedly the other way. I had to check to see if Joe Franklin was alive before posting this item. He is, and it was definitely him.

ITEM: At said hoity-toity Comic Book party, I met a bunch of people who write, draw and edit comic books. Their names would mean nothing to anyone, and actually I don't even like the comics half of them write. But some of them bought me drinks, which makes them okay in my book. It is also amusing to hear comic creators shit-talk. The creator of cinematic classics such as Teen Wolf pantomimed punching me in the face.

ITEM: I saw Horatio Sanz in the audience of the UCB Theater. I was on the fence as to whether this one counted (he is affiliated with the theater so it's kind of like a 'sighting' of Al Roker at the set of the Today Show) but you could tell that he was there to be a spectator and not a performer because he wasn't giggling every three seconds.

ITEM: I am fond of the Hold Steady, I think I may have mentioned that before. The last time I saw them, I also saw (at first separately and later congealed into a wad of celebrity) Andy Blitz, Neko Case and David Cross at the concert. I was told later that Cross and Case are dating, so congrats to them and pity to Blitz for being a Third Wheel. In an inverse-celebrity-sighting moment, I suspect I was mistaken for a band member, or at least a minor-celebrity-hanger-on when the bartenders at the after-party insisted that 3/5ths of my drinks were "on the house". Perhaps they were simply generous.

ITEM: Just the other day, I saw Malcolm Gladwell walking near Minor Celebrity Corner. This was a particularly rueful sighting, as I had missed his panel with Steven Johnson at the Strand last week by maybe an hour -- I was going into the Strand just to browse, was momentarily excited to see a flier advertising the panel, then crestfallen to realize it had wrapped up earlier that evening. Anyway, Gladwell's hair is reaching the "Tipping Point" (har har) between "reasonable afro" and "Crazy Sideshow Bob Hair". Here's his press picture:


That's a a perfectly respectable afro. Now imagine him not cutting his hair between that picture being taken this spring and now. I'm not saying it's Phil Spector hair:

But it's getting there. Not that I have any room to talk, I have been artlessly chopping off bits of my own hair for months to combat the fact that I last got a real haircut in early January.

Anyway, there's your MCSR for early Autumn 2005!



*as determined by BigChampagne's latest "Completely Made Up Figures" chart (2005/10/02)

To Everyone in New York City:
The kids love The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Comedy Central is hoping the kids will also love TDS's spinoff, The Colbert Report. If you are one of the kids, I'm just saying, you can send a message to the e-mail address on that website and get free tickets to a taping really easily. Way easier than the Daily Show or Conan. And it tapes later, like at 7:30pm so you can even go to a taping and work on the same day.

To Everyone not in New York City:
You're probably not going to be able to go to a taping of The Colbert Report any time soon, and I'm sorry. You also have probably been subjected to me talking about how much I like the Hold Steady. Starting tomorrow they are touring the upper part of the United States and may well be coming to a City Near You! Unless you live in Lawrence, in which case they're not coming very near you at all, but keep your fingers crossed. I know you are all smart people and know how to steal intellectual property, but just in case their website has some intellectual property given freely. In addition to being a very good band, they are nice people despite holding controversion views regarding the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. You should try to see them.

To Everyone, More or Less Everywhere:

I like Arrested Development. I like David Cross. David Cross is on Arrested Development and he likes it enough to do talk show appearances promoting it. David Cross does not like talk shows.

To promote the third season (which I hope all of you are watching or at least strongarming your Nielsen-Family neighbors into leaving on in the background while they vacuum), David Cross appeared on Last Call with Carson Daly. David Cross has progressed to High Concept contempt for the talk show format. You can watch it here. It is funny.

To A [Self] Select[ed] Group in the New York City Area:
A drunken fling with eBay last week has netted me two new Trivial Pursuit sets, due to arrive in Brooklyn within the week. Welcoming "The 1980s in Review" and "Silver Screen Edition" into my life has reinvigorated my desire to cajole a number of friends or acquaintances into playing The Most Dangerous Game, which is to say Super Trivial Pursuit -- two dice, six different question sets of varying reasonableness. I feel that this is something that people can only be coaxed into doing through a mixture of alcohol and pity. Alcohol is easy, and my birthday is next month, so indulging this stupid whim can be sold to others as a "birthday present". Personalized pleadings will be distributed in the near future.

1. Go here.
2. Pass it on.
( my answers )

( MORE MEME MADNESS )

Seems like as soon as college got out and the temperature hit eighty degrees, two classes of people began stalking the streets of downtown Manhattan - minor celebrities and really pushy panhandlers.

First, the panhandlers: One day I took my lunch break at Taco Bell. Roll your eyes if you want, but it's cheap and sadly about the best Mexican food you're liable to get in most parts of Manhattan. Within moments of sitting down to eat, a woman using that old workhorse, "I am deaf and I have small, worn business cards with a couple of sign language lessons on them, if you would give me a dollar or two you can have them." Only rather than try to get you to take it on the street or otherwise personally exhort you to help out her budding entrepreneurial career, she just walked around to each table and set one down in front of the diners, placing a card on top of my fountain drink. To her credit, she didn't make any further sales pitches when she came back and 'my' card was sitting two tables down from where I was, but she did get into some sort of grunting argument with another customer who had apparently ignored the entire procedure, and was confused when she demanded payment for the card he did not realize he had tacitly agreed to purchase. She was followed within two minutes by another guy who just wandered from table to table, asking people if he could get one of their tacos or something. He was ultimately polite, but quite insistent that people who had more than one item of food on their tray could surely give him a chalupa or something. Finally, as I was putting my trash away a third panhandler came up to me and asked if the soda on top of the trash can was mine, and if he could have it. I finally relented.

This was the most exceptional example, but overall the tenor and frequency of entreaties for money, food, cigarettes, liquor, baby formula, metrocards and all other forms of charity seem to have intensified over the past month or so. Maybe this is a coincidence, maybe it's a case of an as-yet unrecorded economic downturn in Manhattan, or maybe the destitute of New York City have noticed the same thing I have: more semi-famous (and presumably wealthy) people have been coming around lately. In the past few weeks, I have seen:
-Bob Saget, taking his daughter on a tour of my university
-Sean Lennon, looking very Let it Be-era Paul McCartney, walking into Guitar Center
-Jon Spencer, complete with self-promoting Blues Explosion/Boss Hog bedecked guitar case riding the F line (continuing my ongoing trend of only seeing musical semi-celebrities on subways, surely some basic cable actors, authors and other somewhat-notables have Metrocards!)
-Michel Gondry at a friend's post-MOCCA book release party in an abandoned building, drinking wine from a red plastic SOLO cup

I don't mean to point any of these out to brag, more to try to link two phenomena together. Besides, if anyone has room to brag, it is surely my friend Ian, who was so excited (and rightfully so!) about seeing Jay Kordich that he called me to tell me all about it. The Juiceman! On a Lower East Side bench! SMOKING! I can't believe he didn't juice that cigarette!

[[IMPORTANT WARNING, I AM GOING TO ELLIPTICALLY SPOIL AN INCONSEQUENTIAL SCENE IN STAR WARS EPISODE THREE ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH THIS ENTRY, IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE YET AND YOU'RE BIG ON AVOIDING SPOILERS, I APOLOGIZE PROFUSELY]]

When I was a kid, every time the 20th Century Fox logo showed up on HBO or TBS or whatever channel was showing a movie - every single time - I immediately became transfixed, hoping against hope that it was going to be a Star Wars movie. Granted, this led to disappointment nearly every single time -- from Hell's heart I stab at thee, Man from Snowy River!. But when it worked: Star Wars! I apparently taught myself to read via Star Wars trading cards and picture books, which probably explains why I learned to read and spell things like "treacherous clutches" and "perilous journey" before I figured out why there was an E in "clothes".

Basically what I am telling you is that I really liked Star Wars growing up. I liked it enough to stay up tonight for a 3:40am showing so that I could see Episode Three in the digital theater. I liked it enough that I stayed in the digital theater even after I discovered that their air conditioning broke and the 12:40 showing had left the now-sweltering room with a nerd smell (a weird combination of Spaghetti-Os, corn syrup and feet) stronger than anything I've ever encountered outside of the Gatekeeper's "gaming" room. (And come on, it's not like I don't regularly experience nerd-heavy environments, this is a milestone!) I liked it enough to go to a Star Wars-themed comedy night rather than take a nap after work to prepare for the aforementioned 3:40am showing.

It was good. I'm never going to watch it with the militaristic frequency I did the originals back in elementary school, where even after not having seen them for 8-10 years I found that every single scene, transition and line of dialogue was still burned into my cortex. But it was unquestionably the most satisfying of the three prequels, and I was pleasantly surprised at how gracefully they linked everything together, even though I'm not sure who thought it was a good idea to have Darth Vader channel Jon Stewart in a pivotal scene. I can understand the position of the people who remain disappointed at the entire prequel endeavor, the preponderance of CGI, the foregone conclusions and the shameless force-choking-M&Ms merch whoring they pulled out for this one. But I had fun with them. I wish they had at least used a couple of physical, plastic-and-plywood starship models in the prequels, but that's just nostalgia talking.

[[HEY, EVERYONE WHO WANTS TO AVOID SPOILERS, I'M DONE WITH THEM NOW. YOU CAN SAFELY READ THIS AGAIN, I GUESS]]

So anyway, it was an enjoyable evening/morning. I am very pleased that I opted to take today off. Tonight I am going to see The Hold Steady in concert -- a concert that was responsible for shooting the legs right out from under my post-finals serotonin rush last week. But I'm going to do everything in my power to not hold that against it. But for now I am going to take a nap. I don't know why I wrote any of this, except so that there would be some post-spoiler content. If I do not lapse into a coma while "napping", I plan to try to eke out the last remaining possible 'novel thoughts or observations' about the first five movies. But that's almost certainly a futile dream. Both the coma and "something new w/r/t Star Wars".

( I know I complain about this sort of thing, but this one was vaguely interesting )

This is obviously a less complex and in-depth dialect survey than that awesome Harvard (Now UWisconsin) prof's one that included "whippin' shitties", but I liked how somehow the only linguistic influence my choices don't betray is Midwestern, seeing as I lived there for something like twenty years. That hardline stance against calling soda "pop" really paid off!

I've never been a "morning person". Pretty much from the moment I had any autonomy in setting my sleep schedule I've been into staying up late. In addition to leading to an intimate knowledge of the terrain of late night television, this has affected my life in other ways as well. If not for my rebellion against the tyranny of bedtime, I would likely not be such a fan of Sparks and nearly any other stimulant developed by nature or man. I wouldn't have gotten into that car accident in high school where I fell asleep at a stoplight on the way to a 7:35am class across town at Washburn University and rolled into the car in front of me. (I was saved from incident by fortuitously bumping into the car of a harried businessman, who while waking me up behind the wheel looked at the tie and blazer I was wearing and assumed that, "we both need to get to work" and that there didn't seem to be any serious damage. More about my blazer and tie later, I think.) And I probably wouldn't have befriended half of the other damaged, nocturnal people I met in college, either.

Right now my school and work schedule dictates that I do not need to "get up" at any time before about 2pm four days out of the week. My "early" days require me to get out of the house around 11:15am. My roommate is nearly as nocturnal. All of this combined with the recent "springing forward" of Daylight Savings Time has resulted in what feels like the final obliteration of my circadian rhythms. I know I say this every year, but I think I have seen the "wrong side of the sunrise"* out of my window every single morning since DST came into effect. It is my hope that I can fall asleep quickly tonight (Tuesday is one of my "early" days) and get to bed by five. We'll see if I pull this off.

But what brought this all up for me was that as a benefit of Daylight Savings Time (screw you, Indiana!), tonight I actually got to see a sunset while walking to the subway from class. The sky was completely clear in that weird megalopolis "no stars because of the massive candlelight generated by millions of people and buildings", and the moon hung there over 14th street in a jaunty little crescent, and the blossoms on the trees swayed in the breeze and shifted colors as they reflected the lights in Guitar Center's big window displays, and the west half of the sky was this brilliant deep blue owing to the lights and the sunset and this low green glow emanating from Jersey. And it was really really really really beautiful.

I tried taking a picture with my crappy camera phone, but all that came of it was this:



Maybe it's me, but the moon loses something of its allure when it's reduced to a 4x4 pixel blob. In fact, rather than being a jaunty picture of a lovely spring evening, it looks vaguely like a crappy reproduction of some old "big beat" album I bought in high school:



Speaking of which, tomorrow I want to talk about high school some more. I am finally getting into the self-indulgent swing of livejournal!






* Honestly, what is the "right" side of sunrise? I sure as hell don't want to be waking up at six in the morning. Nothing against my father or anyone else who does it regularly, but does it really feel any more "right" to be up at that hour than it does to go to bed three to four hours after any television programmer expects you to be awake?

I'm not good with meeting famous (or pseudo-famous) people I admire. It's got nothing to do with being starstruck, and it's got nothing to do with some sort of axiom where you meet your heroes and discover them to be depressingly human and fallible and you can never view them in the same light again. Most of the "semi-famous people I admire" that I've met have come off as wonderful human beings in my encounters with them. I just end up coming off like some sort of poorly socialized doofus.

In the past couple weeks I've attended two* book readings by authors I admire: Greil Marcus, whose writing on punk rock I really enjoyed and used as a listening guide in high school, and Sarah Vowell, for whom my devotion since Radio On probably borders on if not barrels straight into creepy. In both cases, the act of getting a book autographed by them turned (for me) into the sort of low-but-lasting burning embarassment that can only be allayed through drink.

The Sarah Vowell one wasn't that bad, in retrospect. It was at a Barnes & Noble, and the entire thing was done in an orderly assembly line fashion. We were ushered into line and assistants wrote my name out onto a post-it note attached to my copy of the book. The book was then handed to Ms. Vowell, who for some reason asked for confirmation of the spelling of my name, and then began to sign my book. Our conversation was roughly this:

"So that's just Chris, C-H-R-I-S?"
"Yep. So, I saw that you got to do that "Literary Cribs" segment for the Incredibles DVD."
"Yeah."
"That was neat."
"Yeah, for some reason some people at Disney were against putting that on there, but it made it on."
"Well, I'm glad it did."
"Yeah."

Nothing bad, right? Maybe I sounded a little inarticulate and maybe adults shouldn't be watching bonus features that are on the DVD of a children's movie, but I didn't make an ass out of myself. I just felt like some sort of intrusive asshole about the whole thing, for reasons I can't articulate. But the structure, the built-in interchangable generic feel the entire process of Barnes & Noble Book Tour Signing #1592 gives the interaction saved me from fumbling into saying anything exceptionally awful.

I had no such safety net when meeting Greil Marcus. He was speaking at New School, and my Popular Music Criticism professor found out about the lecture, which would take place during our class for the night. We went as a "field trip", and at the end I was chatting with my professor about the event when he spied the table selling Marcus's new book, which was the subject of the lecture. He asked me if I was going to buy the book, and impulse and peer pressure -- or professor pressure or whatever -- got the better of me. Books purchased, the professor then declared that we could get the books signed. A capital idea!

I'm not much of a fan of autographing out of captivity. This probably stems when I was in elementary school and I tried to get George Brett's autograph in a hotel bathroom and he brought me to tears with angry interrogation about what "son of a bitch dealer" had coerced me into getting his autograph to resell. After I tearfully promised I was getting the autograph for my own collection, Brett apologized. I don't want to make him sound like a bad guy, but he's certainly helped me be hyper-sensitive about the annoyances of autograph seekers.

Don't get me wrong, Marcus was just sitting behind the table he spoke from, dealing with a small cluster of people looking to get autographed or to ask him questions. I stood behind my professor, grateful for the fact that he would likely do the heavy work for me, explaining to Marcus that he teaches his book Mystery Train, that I was a student in the class, blah blah blah. I could just smile and exude appreciation if need be. But no, my prof decides to be generous and says, "You go first!"

So not wanting to be an inconsiderate jerk who just shoves a book into an author's face and demands an autograph, I begin semi-coherently muttering something about how I'm a big fan of Lipstick Traces and Ranters & Crowd Pleasers, and I liked his reading and I read Mystery Train and--

"I'm sorry, could you speak up, I can't hear anything you're saying."

I'm a big fan of your books and I liked the lecture.

He stares at me, perhaps expecting something better than generic praise.

So I launch into something that I thought was going to say something to the effect that I really enjoyed reading his books about contemporary-for-the-time-of-writing popular music from the 1970s through the early 1990s, and used those books as a roadmap to a lot of music I wasn't familiar with, and really valued them for that purpose. And because of that, I'd be interested to know what he thinks of music that is contemporary-for-right-now.

Instead, I became aware as I was saying it that it came out rather closer to "I like your new books and all and I like the historical perspective you give but have you considered writing about something more contemporary?"

Which given his expression and body language was interpreted as "Why are you writing all this ollllllld shit?" And so he very politely points out how he's been writing a column on "all sorts of music, including new music" for the City Pages in Minneapolis for fifteen -- "no wait, more like nineteen years". Which you would've known if you were such a big fan, you stupid bastard, was my own interpretation of what he trailed off from saying. Then he signed my book, I thanked him, and I walked off. This wasn't quite as bad as the time I somehow ended up telling James Kochalka that KJHK had thrown his CD out and I found it in a recycling bin and most of my friends hated it too, but a couple of friends and I really liked it. But it was still rather lamentable.

There have been other semi-famous people - Grant Morrison, Douglas Rushkoff and Evan Dorkin all spring to mind - who I've felt just peachy after meeting. And it's not as if I have a better won/loss ratio when it comes to managing conversation on my first attempt with people who are not famous and who I have no prior knowledge of. I don't think I'm very good at first impressions. I'm not positive I'm good at any impressions.

Oh, and as a post-script, the dust jacket of the Marcus book containing the autograph of shame got all fucked up on the way home from the reading. So I should probably just burn the thing before it brings a curse upon my whole house.


* Actually I went to see Sarah Vowell twice, so three total readings, but two unique individuals...

I really don't have a very good story for this one. It's the theme song to a Spanish game show, "El Gran Juego de la Oca" - The Big Game of... well, I'm guessing duck or goose or something, but online dictionaries aren't helping me much. The important thing is that I've had this MP3 kicking around for a couple years now, and forget how I got it. I just know that it is the perfect song with which to start your day.

Give it a listen!

The other important thing is that the show looks great. Like Double Dare, only aimed at adults and with physical challenges that can fuck you up. I wonder if this ever aired in the US? If not, why not?

From the virtuoso musicality of JYD, to the proto-rap musings of C.W. McCall, we move now on "Hump Day" to an MP3 that does not have any singing or music at all!

Rising from the murky depths of FYAD comes tonight's MP3, Ol' Dirty Bastard's audition tape for the remake of Mr. Ed! Yes, perhaps emboldened by the modest success of the two Doctor Doolittle features, a television revamp of Mr. Ed had been in the works for a few years, and the minds behind this new version decided that the best way to really illustrate the culture clash between square old Wilbur and Mr. Ed - who is considered his property and less than human - is to give Ed the voice of a sassy black man! They eventually settled on Sherman Hemsley, but not before soliciting audition tapes from a number of other candidates, including the dearly departed Ol' Dirty Bastard.

What follows is a reading of only Mr. Ed's lines throughout the show. You will soon realize this show would not have been very funny, even if they had gotten Dirt to play the horse. In the fast-paced jet-set world of the 21st Century, it's not enough just to have animals talk -- witness Racing Stripes, or the Andy Breckman's struggle to make Hot to Trot funny simply by changing the horse's dialogue. I don't want to say this whole project was a bad idea... but the head writer committed suicide right as the new TV season started.

I expect that in time ODB will produce as many posthumous albums as Tupac, Jimi and Elvis -- or at least as many as other people who have to use full names, like John Lennon or Elliott Smith. I'm sure by 2012, someone will release a new single with "horses can't use phones!" as its hook, but in the meanwhile, here you go.

Today's MP3 comes to you courtesy of Murderbot, who in addition to being a Murderbot, is also a Gentlemanbot and a Scholarbot.

When I lived in Stephenson Scholarship Hall, there was some discussion about what the worst song ever might be. I do not remember the exact scenario, but eventually it came to light that then-roommates Caleob King and Sam Pierron both knew the words to C.W. McCall's "Convoy" by heart, and that it was a frontrunner for "worst song ever" consideration.

There are other tales to tell about "Convoy", but little did I realize that there were more tales to tell about the Convoy! In today's MP3, C.W. McCall's "Around the World with the Rubber Duck", we follow Pig Pen, the Duck and their long haired friends of Jesus on a globetrotting trucking experience, which involves McCall or one of his studiomates adopting truly awful British, German, Russian and offensive-Chineeman accents, and -- I kid you not -- an entire verse with "this is dumb" sung underneath the main lyrics. This is truly mindbending stuff, and introduces all sorts of terminology that my CB slanguage guidebook has not prepared me for. What are "no double nickel limits"? And why does Australia have them? With all these unanswered questions, might C.W. McCall be compelled to complete his trilogy?

In honor of Abraham Lincoln, the first president to openly endorse peer-to-peer distributed file sharing, this week I shall post an MP3 of interest each day in my livejournal.

Monday's entry comes as a service to picosecond, who mentioned this song last week.

Grab Them Cakes - The Junkyard Dog

This 1986 Slammy Award winning track comes from the WWF Wrestling Album, which I had in college in its original vinyl. For reasons unknown I played it on my very first college radio show, on my very last college radio show, and several other times for arbitrary "anniversary" shows. Now, through the wonders of the internet, the home viewer can witness the aural assault I subject stoned KJHK listeners so many times over the years.

While unquestionably not a good song, "Grab them Cakes" (and selected other tracks off the Wrestling Album) are performed with tongue lodged firmly enough into cheek that I can feel like I am laughing with the wrestlers and their horrid performances, unlike later abortions (the Hulk Hogan Boot Band and Macho Man Randy Savage's rap album spring to mind) where I'm too uncomfortable to even laugh at the grim tableau before me.

TOMORROW: a song I did not even know existed until yesterday, but has instantly found a place in my heart -- and my Friendster profile.

Today is a very special day. No, not because of that. And no, not because of that crazy Papist/Hallmark conspiracy. No, not even because it's Jack Benny's birthday, that beautiful cheap bastard.

( This is somewhere on monkeyporn but the archives are racked up )

In other news that I know is the real reason everyone keeps coming back to my livejournal, the computing troubles of my parents continue! I was back at my parents' this weekend, to help them get their computer tricked out with a tablespoon of familial love and a sprinkling of illegal software, but shortly before I arrived something went horribly wrong with some portion of the power supply/wiring of the computer, so that it would shut off somewhere between 2 and 20 minutes after being turned on. This happening about ten days after they've received the computer refurbished - and with the hard drive wiped, for some reason - after the motherboard failed. And no, the motherboard failing did not damage the hard drive, as I pulled it out and backed up all their information. So now they're without a computer again, and dealing with a company that only has their tech support line open from 9am-5pm PST, Monday through Friday. And who do not seem to cotton much to the idea of "refunds" so much as "let us fix your computer again and when we send it back it will no longer be under warranty". So that was a bit of a wash, as weekend plans go.

Although my aunt and uncle did have a Mardi Gras party on Saturday night. Yes, four days into Lent. There was some very nice "Cajun"* food, and for some reason I decided I needed to drink Thunderbird. Laissez Les Bons Temps!


* I put this asterisk here and the quotation marks above not because I think there was any sort of flaw, in terms of quality or character, in the crabcakes, gumbo and jambalaya I ate at my aunt and uncle's house. I do not know anything of "Cajun" food outside of what I learned from some old Lay's Potato Chips commercial and from the wit and wisdom of Leatherhead on the Ninja Turtles cartoon. I don't wish to receive a browbeating from anyone who stumbles upon this and bristles at the insinuation that a Cajun would eat gumbo with CELERY in it.

Evidence I Should Perhaps Get More Sleep, one of a series:

On Tuesday I woke up with less time than strictly neccesary to get ready to go to work. I managed to get five blocks out of my house when I realized that I was wearing mismatched shoes. I only noticed then when I slipped on a wet patch of concrete, and observed that the soles of one shoe seemed to have better traction than the other.

It should be said that this setback did afford me the chance to see a strange and wonderful sight. On my second, footwear-coordinated commute, I witnessed a man pleading apologetically via what I assumed was a hands-free cellular phone. I manuevered my way around his pacing orbit, and was nearly hit on the head with a wadded up one hundred dollar bill. His pleading was apparently aimed at a woman standing on a third story fire escape, and he was rewarded with $100 cash. Why he needed that money so desperately at 11:30am, and why the woman was unwilling to put on anything but a sweatsuit and just toss the money out a window, I will likely never know. But it's fun to have money fall from the sky.

On Wednesday I dressed myself successfully, but forgot my MP3 player. Not having music to listen to on the subway or at work while shelving books had deleterious effects, as I got an awful melange of songs stuck in my head:

• Ted Leo & the Pharmacists' "Ballad of the Sin Eater" but with the lyrics for "Hotel California" because I didn't really know the words to "Sin Eater".
  
• The chorus to the New Pornographer's "Letter from an Occupant", because I didn't know any other part of the song.
  
• Elvis Costello's "Lipstick Vogue" -- I actually know the entire song, but it kept on turning into "Letter from an Occupant".
  
• The Band's "Up on Cripple Creek", which at the time I did not even know the title of. I just had the vaguest sound outline of the song from some documentary my dad had been watching over Christmas break.
  

Maybe that doesn't sound that bad to you, but it was relatively harrowing for me. That night on the ride home, a fellow attempted to wrangle his ladyfriend's attention away from the newspaper by serenading her with a wandering medley of songs from They Might be Giants's Flood, in a voice I can only compare to Neil Hamburger doing Shatner-style spoken word readings. Maybe this is commonplace on the subways, all of the post-post-ironic kids wooing their ladies with off-key indie-pop culture mash-ups. If that is the case, I've been blissfully unaware of it thanks to my MP3 player.

Low-Culture Appropriation of High Art Questions

On Saturday I went with Ian and Jessica to the last day of the "Newtonian Moment" exhibition at the New York Public Library. It was pretty neat, and some of the artifacts - a revision galley for Principia, a kick-ass clockwork Solar System model from the 18th century, a bizarre collection of Ben Franklin documents - were pretty sweet. One section of the exhibit was dedicated to Newton's influence on the arts, and there were two paintings that struck me as really familiar:

I'm starting to think this was used for a concert poster that was hanging in the KJHK bathroom (Foetus?) but maybe I've seen it elsewhere. I certainly feel it's connected in some way to music of the early 1980s, be it by poster, album cover or t-shirt.

The other weird deja vu moment was looking at a segment of James Barry's tryptich(?) called "Elysium". I couldn't find the actual painting, just an engraving of the appropriate section:



I'm reasonably sure that's Descartes on the right, and the painted version has that sort of Rembranty glow to it. It's entirely possible that it's just appeared as the cover to some Descartes book I've read, although I haven't read that much Descartes. For some reason I want to say this painting appeared in a music video. I don't know.

Can anyone identify the low-culture reappropriation of either of these images?

While my family's battle against technology rages on - my brother's old Compaq is DOA, my parents' three month old HP is off getting its motherboard replaced - my personal computer setup is nearly back to optimal.

A new CPU was purchased over the winter break, a bold and risky move considering that the first time I went out looking my parents' HP deactivated itself in a jealous rage. I purchased almost exactly the same computer, and am tempting fate by setting its possessive ass right next to my geriatric old Dell. While a new pristine computer, finally running an operating system new enough to fiddle with iTunes, was exciting it didn't feel like my computer until I could put all of my files and MP3s and random stupid utilities onto it, hastening its decline into an unusable scrap heap. And I couldn't do that until my portable hard drive came back from repairs. It came back this weekend, and I nearly shat myself when I opened the package to see it in what looked like factory-sealed anti-static wrap. I thought they had sent me a completely new hard drive and I had lost eighty gigabytes of pretty much everything ever. But it was all there, and I am slowly acclimating these files to my spacious new computer.

I couldn't get a wired local network set up between my old computer and new, which is a shame because it decreases my available active disk space from 450GB down to 300GB. Somehow I'll have to make do.

The true technological breakthrough of my winter break was the glorious acquisition of a DONGLE for my celphone. True, so far all I've done with it is download "The Final Countdown" as my ringtone, but now I can get games and pictures and ringtones for free.

Except I really can't imagine wanting a different ringtone.

Let's say you buy a new external hard drive. You might want to be leery of investing too much of yourself into it. You might not, say, want to store the accumulation of ten years of writing, academics and piracy on that hard drive for any longer than the necessary length of time to reformat your hard drive. You'll probably need it to store the massive files for the crappy student film you're making. That's going to be annoying enough when the hard drive breaks, just hours before you are set to transfer the movie to DV cassette and hand it in as your final project. There's no need to be without everything that makes your computer your computer during that harrowing time.

Now, once your hard drive has been broken, and you've abandoned all hope of turning in this project on time, there are a few things you probably cannot help. You had no way of knowing of this impending equipment failure, so you wouldn't have known to have gotten more than four hours of sleep the past few nights. No one told you that buying an Acom external hard drive would mean spending the better part of an hour lost in Acom's brutally retarded phone system, which prompts you every thirty seconds to dial 3-6-9 in order to continue holding, lest it disconnect you. You would become distracted, often with revenge scenarios, and allow your call to drop three times before you spoke with a customer service representative. The good news is, the representative - and you suspect that he may be the entire department, as he dealt with every call you made, and sent you a follow-up e-mail - seemed cordial and confident. The bad news is that the receipt, which is required for any sort of repair under warranty, is unavailable until your father returns from China the following week.

The big lesson, the one that you couldn't possibly have planned for, is that as all of this happens, as sleep and stress make the corners of your eyes feel like they're in a perpetual frost-bitten wind tunnel, as what may be an ulcer burns upon contact with another cup of coffee, as you ride along on the F train to scramble for any surviving material from your Media Design class projects, as your MP3 player uncannily picks every diabetic-sweet kandy-pop song you've loaded onto it, and you feel your the giddy escape, the feeling like you've just pulled off a brilliant scam by navigating through another semester, that feeling drops away and you find yourself longing for a blissful cocoon of alcohol and hard drugs and that amazing, exhausted, depleted braindead sleep that there's no rousing you out of and when you wake up maybe this will all have blown over and everyone can have a nice laugh -- when all of this happens, you probably should have different train reading than a 36 hour back to back combo of Bright Lights, Big City and The Informers.

But if you do, you should steal the literary style of one of them for a livejournal entry about the whole thing.

By pretty much any metric, it would be in my best interest to avoid being up at 5am during my four day weekends, not the least of them being that it severely hampers the ease with which I can leave the house by 9am on my three day marathon work week. But I've always loved flirting with nocturnality, and if I ever had an excuse...

Almost exactly twenty-six years ago (to the hour) I was totally born. That's right; I'm officially in my "late twenties".

I'm not sure what I thought my late twenties would involve. But I've always wanted to be on one of those "21 under 21" or "25 under 25" lists that populate magazines with lazy list-making staffers. My last gambit will be for "Thirty Under Thirty" in what ever magazine chronicles junk academics and cultural critics. I can do this. I've got four whole years. Maybe I need to appoint a new cabinet.

I think this dourness has less to do with my lot in life (which I mostly am grateful for and psyched about) but for the fact that I know that this birthday - and each subsequent one, forevermore, will be bring to mind the untimely passing of the ODB. I am quite sincere in the pall this has cast over my weekend, all four days of it. We were born ten years and one day apart, and through all his ups and downs, I felt a kinship with Dirt. I would defend his solo work, try to clear up misconceptions about his various legal entanglements, and for one either lamentable or glorious semester - opinions are mixed - I would recaptiulate and recontextualize his landmark Grammy Award speech each month as Stephenson Scholarship Hall's secretary.

The world is a less strange place without ODB in it, and that colors any day, birthday or not.

I voted. Last night I stumped to my parents one final time. Results aren't really going to get flowing until 7pm or so. The partisan hackery of Air America and/or Limbaugh/O'Reilly/Hannity was just tying my stomachs in knots rather than being amusing. And I got burned early on with Drudge's Pennsylvania Pre-Vote Scandal that turned out to be nothing.

So I'm declaring the next couple of hours a THINK ABOUT SOMETHING OTHER THAN THE ELECTION zone.

Here are some things that do not involve the future of our political system!

1. Is there some pervasive cultural figure that I have never seen who has bobbed pink hair? Because I know I saw about fifty people dressed up as this person on Halloween. Whilst trying to escape the madding crowds that thronged alongside the parade route, I walked by an East Village bar in which about six out of fifteen people were wearing these wigs. They were everywhere. Who has pink hair, besides Pink? Does she even have pink hair anymore? Is it a breast cancer thing? Was there a glut of cheap pink wigs on the market? Does "costume" for Halloween now just describe "dressing a little oddly"?

2. What is it with Superman and business books these days? These people went so far as to pay to use Superman on the cover of their book, and it's obvious that the designers for Overachievement wanted to. I'm guessing Gimmicky Marketing Guy Seth Godin was worried his cereal box pastiche wasn't going to properly capture the zeitgeist, so for no apparent reason there's a cartoon Superman analogue on that cover too. I know the economy is on the upswing, but isn't it dangerous to be bombarding the tender minds of our young professionals with images like this? In the event that the stock market crashes, won't this impel even more people to leap out of windows, with the ingrained believe that they'll just fly down to Washington and punch Greenspan until he fixes thing? There's also a trend towards superhero-based Teen Romance, but I can't remember the names of any of those books.

3.



...this fucking election!

Why am I finding out about another Mclusky show two days in advance and when my work schedule is going to botch seeing them?

Why does the entire new R.E.M. album sound like those singles they released that I halfway tolerated? Who is benefitting from an entire album of "Bang and Blame" and "Sad Professor"? How could this take them three years to put together?

Why does my disdain for this album fall away from watching one cheesy Messiah Complex video for "Leaving New York" with its empty airport shots and Michael Stipe in a white suit? Am I that easily bought?

Why are R.E.M. still being shown on "Subterranean"? Did I hallucinate them being some multi-platinum pop behemoth for my entire adolescence?

Why did On!Air!Library! sample the AIM "door open" noise so goddamn much in their song "Fell to Earth"?

Why can't the guy from the Decemberists puhhhwnouce his auuuuw sounds cowuuuhectly?

Why did Spike Jonze make a weak "Come to Daddy" rip-off video for his girlfriend? And where is this "it's inspired by Thriller and Beat It!" line of reasoning coming from?

Why did some shitty music magazine (I forget which one) list Karen O and Nick Zinner separately in their "30 Coolest people in Rock" list? Are the Yeah Yeah Yeahs going to release solo albums a la KISS and the Melvins?

Why did Eminem release a lead single that can only be appreciated -- or indeed, considered remotely tolerable -- if you look at it as a scathing meta-critique of current commercial hip hop?

Why they come up with witness protection?

Why they let the Terminator win the election?

Why?

Nothing is Impossible by Christopher Reeve

Apparently someone decided the book must be a pack of lies, and sold it off to the Strand.

In other book-related news, as of tomorrow, I am a librarian! Or whatever it is they call the people who work at a library but don't have a degree in Library Science. Librarian's Aide?