Don’t You See That That Was Then, But Now is Now

So I’m starting this blog, mainly because I do a lot of writing, and a lot of it doesn’t really fit as a story or as an essay, and I’d like to find some place to put it. I hope this blog will be an entertaining place to stick things that don’t have good place otherwise, like short, half-fake biographies of famous people, character sketches, brief bits of funny, and the occasional record review that isn’t really about a record. Anyway, I hope those few who read it will find it amusing and occasionally interesting. From now on it will be all new material; I know the older stuff is familiar, culled from Facebook, which I hope to visit less and less as time goes on. From now on out, Now is Now, and no more of that old business. Here goes!

A Few Brief Notes on the Flying Car

A flying car is defined as an automobile that can legally travel on
roads as well as take off, fly, and land as an aircraft. Often
mentioned in the same breath as the hovercraft and teleporter, the
flying car has longed seem less a practical concept and more a
science-fiction dream of the 1950’s, permanently confined to the
over-stimulated brains of kooks and self-proclaimed “inventors.”

Only the flying car actually exists. Its first initial flight took
place on this day, February 21st, in 1939. Called the Aerobile, it
was developed by Waldo Waterman; powered by a Studebaker engine, it
achieved speeds of 110 mph in the air and 55 mph on land.

In fact, tests by Ford Motors in the 50’s deduced that the flying car
was technically feasible, easily manufactured, and could serve a
variety of markets. So what went wrong?

The Federal Aviation Administration felt that air-traffic control -
which at the time consisted mainly of little slips of paper covered with
scribbled altitudes kept in a case in a control room – was inadequate
to handle flying traffic. And what about drunk drivers? The last
thing America needed, they decided, were airborne alcoholics crashing
into unassuming homes and gardens. Thus ended the dreams of market
feasibility for the flying car.

And what about the maverick inventor, Waldo Waterman? Known to break
bones and risk life and limb test-flying his own aircraft, the
obviously eccentric – but by all acounts extremely well-groomed -
inventor lived out his days experimenting with various forms of
aircraft for – where else? – the U.S. military.

The Lovebird

A lovebird – called “les inseparables” (inseparables) by the French – is a
very affectionate parrot. It comes in a variety of shapes and colors, with and without a collar.

Because of its famous capacity for attachment, many people feel strongly that
lovebirds in captivity should be kept only in pairs. Others believe that
lovebirds are social animals, and can bond with human companions if given
a great deal of care and attention.

Lovebirds rarely talk; if yours does, consider this a bonus. The lifespan of the lovebird is ten to fifteen years.

Before taking on the burden of a lovebird, please be advised that they require inordinate amounts of attention; gauge whether you have enough time to
devote to its care and maintenance. You and your lovebird will be happier
in the long run.

Lovebirds are all of the genus Agapornis and can produce offspring with other lovebirds within the same genus. It is recommended to only place birds of the same species together, or of the same sex, for the sake of the potentially faulted hybrid offspring.

Lovebirds can be a nuisance. They enjoy chewing on dangerous objects, like telephone wires. They become moody and depressed easily. They make ill-mannered morning noises. Often they lapse into states of total lethargy, and demand special care.

You may find yourself choosing between your lovebird and your career.

Black-winged lovebirds often enjoy figs. Other types of lovebirds do not.

A Woman on the Subway, Eating Grapes

In the immortal words of Ray Davies, I’m not the world’s most passionate guy. I’m not cold, I don’t think, or prudish; I’m just not in the habit of lusting on a daily basis, and certainly not after complete strangers. I AM in the habit of liking/loving strangers for next to no reason, but that’s a different kind of thing, a “hey girl with the odd scar on your lip and the reserved way of sitting, why don’t we take a walk down by the bay, I betcha got a bunch of great stories” kind of thing. Lust is different. I know this because I saw a woman eating grapes on the subway yesterday, passing the 36th street station in Brooklyn.

I haven’t been in Brooklyn very much. Maybe if I lived in New York things would be different. But as it stands in Philadelphia, public transit doesn’t bring me closer to the world at large; it makes me drift away. People on the El either fade into the background or make themselves into unwelcome distractions. Oftentimes I don’t notice my stop is coming until the announcement comes over the loudspeaker. I half forget I’m going anywhere. Suddenly it’s Fifth street, and I jump to my feet.

But yesterday I was worried about where I was going, it being my first time alone on the D train, and so I was paying more attention than I might have to my surroundings. Which is why, I guess, that I saw the woman get on at 36th street, and why I paid so much attention to what she was doing.

She was tall, and wore a tan coat that fell to her knees. Her nose sloped up to precise point, and her mouth had a lovely curve at the edges, but her eyebrows were very narrow and her overall expression was serious. She sat down two seats away from me and looked both ways down the car, and then she relaxed a bit, as people sometimes do on the subway when they’re sure no one crazy is around. The strings of her floppy hat spun a little from left to right.

I tried not to stare. The last thing I ever want to do is disturb someone’s commute. I looked back at the book I had been eager to finish a minute before, but I couldn’t pay attention to it.

And around the time I decided I wasn’t going to be able to finish my book, the woman reached into her plastic bag and took out a bunch of grapes. They were green and fairly large, and they shone a bit in the dull light of subway car. It’s been a long time since I had some grapes, I thought.

Then the woman did something I’ve never seen someone do before. She took a grape lightly in her right hand and began to rub it against her left palm, lightly. She looked up at the ceiling and smiled a little to herself. Her face started to soften, ever so slightly. What’s she doing? I thought. Is she cleaning the grape? Or does she just like the feeling of it in her palm? Whatever purpose it served, she rolled the grape slowly and carefully from side to side for about thirty seconds.

And then, when she figured she had finished whatever she was trying to do, she took the grape in her right hand, put it in her mouth, and crushed it with her teeth and tongue. And her face assumed a look of satisfaction the likes of which I haven’t seen in some time, a look of deep, complex enjoyment you don’t usually see in subway cars or other public places.

After a few more seconds of rest, the woman reached back into her bag and pulled out another grape. And this time, knowing just how enjoyable those grapes must have been, the motion of her hands seemed less like a mysterious ritual than a preparation, done for her own enjoyment. I put my head down and closed my eyes. It seemed like a private kind of moment, and I suddenly felt embarrassed to be watching.

But for the second I watched her eating those grapes, I was reminded of a lot of things: light on someone’s back in bed in the morning, patterns of freckles, the way someone’s lips taste when they’ve had one or two cigarettes, citrus, and other things I don’t feel are polite to mention in public forums. More things than usually come to mind in the space of ten seconds, on a typical Saturday afternoon. Like someone reaching into your mind and switching on the light.

Sometimes thoughts like that can make you sad. But the woman eating the grapes wasn’t sad in the slightest, and so it didn’t seem to make sense for me to be sad, either. And there was something about the images in my head, rolling silently towards my stomach and making my chest expand a little bit, that made me happier than I had been a minute before. Letting those sorts of memories and old sensations take hold of you kind of reminds you that you’re an authentic member of the human race.

The woman took a few more grapes out of her bag before I got off at 9th avenue. Maybe if I was a braver person I would have asked her for one. But it’s probably better that I didn’t. It’s rare that someone enjoys themselves that much in public, and they don’t need me weirding it up. And although it was definitely lust I felt – and I did really want one of those grapes – it was a complex thing that I wouldn’t want to get anyone else mixed up in. It probably had more to do with me than it did with her.

After I got off the train – it was the wrong train, coincidentally, and I had to wait on the platform in the cold for the return car – I spent ten minutes or so worrying whether I was a weirdo. Eventually I decided that even if I was – which was probable – then there was nothing I could do about it. I hadn’t done any harm. I should just let it go.

Only I’ve been thinking about it on and off since then. It was just such a strangely intense thing to have happen when I wasn’t expecting it. And it opened up a lot of memories I don’t usually focus on, and some that I try not to. So it’s been hard to get off of my mind.

Which is why I’m telling you about it, although the story doesn’t really have a point. I apologize. I hope I didn’t weird anything up, or anything.

The Nexus of Humor is in the Bad Grammar

It is the solution: we like the poor placement of words!
So I was sifting through some of that old humor business, and I came across – I did! – a bunch of blogs that were all about the funny. No joking! Some of them were about D&D and all that stuff. Others were about fighting. But the joke is they all had the tongue up in the cheek, and you know what that means.

It means the creators were in on the funny.

And you know the secret? it was bad grammar. They all used the bad grammar to approximate others and their poor word choices and thus capture the humor.

My conclusion: the funny is in the misuse of wording. Especially the thing we call the article, because that is funny!

Let me demonstrate. Here is a perfectly normal paragraph!

NASA will begin a review of its psychological screening for astronauts, NASA said Wednesday — a day after astronaut Lisa Nowak was charged with attempting to murder a love rival. Meanwhile, Nowak was having a medical evaluation, which would also include a psychological evaluation, NASA said.

Wait, that’s already full of funny.

Tune in next time for more wordy explanation of the funny which will kill it!

A Week in the Title Shop: On Boring Dreams

So, I was working in the title shop. That’s what we did, we gave people titles. People came in, and they needed titles, and we gave them to them. The titles were generated by a computer system, and then we had to fill out forms in triplicate, staple them, and then file them appropriately.

This dream lasted three weeks. Nothing remotely exciting happened. There were the usual vagaries of office politics. Someone cried over their poor job performance, which was a little embarassing, frankly. I tried to ignore it, keep my eyes on my own work.

What does it say about me that I sometimes have these intensely boring dreams that last a seemingly absurd amount of time? I don’t THINK I spend a lot of time thinking about triplicate copying and filing.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

The Smooth Sounds of Romance: on the New Lullatone Album

Many people write songs about sex. Or maybe, to put it more appropriately, they write songs about fucking. There are songs about fucking on pretty much every radio station during almost every second of the day these days. You can’t escape it. I am not against this, per se. Sometimes I really like these sorts of songs. Case in point: Spank Rock. Although I’m not entirely sure their schtick isn’t some huge joke, which might explain why I like it so much. But I use them as an example to point out that I’m not against a good old raunchy dance track every once in a while.

While mainstream radio has been very good at cornering the “we like songs about fucking” demographic, the indie community (whatever that is) has been, on the whole, less comfortable with the whole issue of sex. When indie rock meets dance you sometimes get a sense that the music being made might very well LEAD to sex, in a private room somewhere a little removed from the song itself, but there’s very little open discussion of mutual sexual satisfaction in indie rock or “indie dance” (whatever that is). Maybe its because the musicians don’t get laid nearly enough.

At perhaps the farthest edge of indie rock’s wierd asexuality rests the genre of indie pop, with its willful childishness and strange, flat production. Bands like Boy Least Likely To, I’m From Barcelona, and Architecture in Helsinki write childish songs with cartoonish production to match; I don’t want to sound like an audiophile, considering I don’t really know shit about it, but you’d have to be deaf not to notice that there’s little sonic depth in the productions of any of these bands. It’s all surface, and it aint too sexy. It sounds like a pre-teen sugar rush from the days when video games occupied more of our time than sexual urges.

Which is why I don’t really feel like Lullatone, whose new record “Plays Pajama Pop Por Vous” is currently playing on my stereo, can really be classified as indie pop. Because Lullatone is getting laid a lot. Together. Because they’re married. And their songs reflect this.

This is not to say that Lullatone is in any way ass-shaking booty-moving sex music. On the contrary; it is shaky, quiet, and kind of spacey. It takes its sweet time getting places. And it hums all over with a kind of contentedness that is hard to classify. It has something to do with warm synth sounds and close miced percussion. It is, in its own weird way, an album that is all about sex.

Most sex music on the radio is about dance-floor sex. One-night sex. Music to meet strange people by and then sleep with them. That’s what it’s made for, and at its best, it works really, really well. I just LOVE seeing people make out to “Work It”. It’s just magical. It’s like watching a brilliant machine turning, all purpose and total follow-through.

Lullatone is not like that. Lullatone is sex music for newly married people who are totally in love. The kind of sex where you lie around in bed afterwards, have tea, and then have sex again because it’s Saturday and you don’t have anything you have to do and all you really want to do is have sex and lie around. Lullatone’s new record sounds like they did all those things on a Saturday morning, were too tired to have sex for a third time, and decided to make some music. It’s absolute afterglow on your stereo.

Other people have tried to make bedroom sex records before. Bjork’s “Vespertine” is sort of a bedroom sex record. But Vespertine is a dark record, too, full of confusion and uncertainty about love. Lullatone haven’t gotten to this point yet. They’re making this music TOGETHER. And they clearly enjoy it. Their love seems kind of sleepy and dream-like, all birds dropping seeds in the earth and doing laundry on the weekend while it’s raining outside. This is sex in a safe place.

Some people might think “Play Pajama Pop Por Vous” is boring. Some people might think it’s simplistic. And I guess it is. Other people’s relationships usually seem kind of boring from the outside. But once you get into it, Lullatone’s record is comforting in a really elemental way, like someone’s wrapping their contended arms around you.

Me and the Parapsychologists’ Daughter: Part One in a Series

I was in a suburban home, having dinner with a family of parapsychologists. You know, ghost hunters, specialists in supernatural occurences. It was a very normal suburban dinner, with brussel sprouts and some sort of meat. The parapsychologists, both husband and wife, were very unassuming. I knew, somehow, that I was dating their daughter, who was adopted and Asian. I was also in a band with their son, playing drums. Everyone at the table seemed to like me enormously. Wow! I thought, in the dream. This is great! I’m totally set!

After the dinner was over, a great party started. The house was suddenly full of people, and I wandered through the house, trying to avoid conversation. The house seemed to be all hallway; it was impossible to get anywhere open, and so if someone saw you walking down the hall there was no way to avoid them.

First the father found me.
“I’m worried about my son”, he said. “I think he’s falling in with the wrong crowd. Especially this kid Ramon, he’s bad news. I don’t know how to handle it any more.”

The father then walked away, and in my travels down the long hallway-house I ran into Ramon. He was about six feet tall, and had greasy hair that was slicked back and a red shirt. He didn’t LOOK like bad news.

“I get a bad rap,” Ramon said. He was stumbling, obviously drunk. “I’m not such a bad guy, you know.”

And with that, Ramon moved on. Suddenly I was face to face with the parapsychologists’ daughter. She was awe-inspiringly beautiful, but friendly-looking all the same. You know, the dream girl type.

“Are you okay?” she asked me.
“Sure,” I said.
She led me out to the back patio. It was still light outside. Naturally, we started making out.

When it comes to this sort of dream action, words often fail me. I mean, we all know making out in real life is a tricky proposition. Sometimes it’s ho-hum, a lot of tongue movement and a little saliva. But this was no pedestrian lip-lock session. The air was abuzz, and our hands were fumbling over themselves in the effort to burrow under each other’s clothing.

But I noticed something was weird. There was a weird sort of energy coming from the garage, which was right behind the patio. There was bad juju in the garage; that much was obvious. But I didn’t want to worry about it. This was a semi-lucid dream, and by God, I was going to focus on the good stuff before waking up.

But the weirdness kept rising up. The air went all sour, and the house started looking sinister, its vinyl siding attaining a sort of sureal David Lynch quality. The girl leaned in and started whispering into my ear.

“My parents keep something in the garage, and sooner or later it’s going to come out.”

And sure enough, as soon as she said it, the garage door started lifting up of its own accord, and I started slipping out of the dream.

I woke up and went back to sleep three times this morning, and all of my dreams involved this house; sometimes I was playing music with the brother, and I am happy to report that I had an extremely passionate sexual encounter with the parapsychologist’s daughter (who I think resembled a girl I danced with at the Cat Club on Saturday).

And at the end of the last dream of the morning, we ended up on the patio again, me and the parapsychologists’ daughter, with the same garage, and the same bad juju. Hold on, I told myself. Maybe she won’t bring it up. Maybe you can just keep making out. Maybe you can stick around in this particular dream for a little while longer. Minutes passed, she was kissing my neck, all the elements of the world were in perfect accord. I barely noticed when she put her lips next to my ear.

“My parents,” she said, whispering. “My parents keep something in the garage.”

I Saw Shortbus with a Whole Bunch of Black People at the Ritz

Every Wednesday, after my spiritually and monetarily enriching job playing music for pre-schoolers, I go to Ms. K’s Koffeespot – a breakfast/lunch counter in the old sense, where one can get a cup of coffee and a bagel with enough cream cheese to give you a massive coronary for under three dollars – and then I catch a movie at one of Philadelphia’s fine Ritz movie theaters. As I usually arrive at the theater at around noon, I tend to be almost alone at any movie I see, which is just fine by me. I hate people! I love cinema!

Only today, things were different. So different, in many interesting ways!

I arrived at twelve, bought a ticket for james Cameron Mitchell’s new opus, “Shortbus”, which, for those of you who don’t know, is about a bunch of New Yorkers engaging in various sexual behaviors in a search for truth, and features a lot of attractive people fucking, FOR REAL, on camera. No simulation, which is what you get in almost all non-porno films released in a given year.

About ten minutes after I sat down in the lobby to wait for the theater to open up, a big group of black folks came into the lobby. They were intending to see “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints”, and were very happy to find that the theater was almost totally empty. The management and counterfolk seemed nervous at the appearance many black faces in their normally whitewashed cultural establishment, and rocked nervously from foot to foot.

One dude walked up to an usher.

“Excuse me, what’s this Shortbus movie you showing?” he asked, quite politely.

The usher, a fairly hipsterish fellow with thick glasses, paused and looked him up and down.

“It’s a movie about the sexual kinks of New Yorkers,” he said, in a tone that managed to sound provocative and condescending AT THE SAME TIME. His whole attitude seemed to imply that his patience was being tested by talking to plebes.

“Really?” the dude said, obviously interested.

He walked back to the group of black folks, who were having a good time reading the Ritz Filmbill and laughing at the funny outfits everybody wore. “I’m seeing shortbus,” the dude said. “it’s some sex movie.”

Hell yes, I thought. This is going to be awesome. And boy was I right.

When the doors opened, the crowd, which consisted of me, a homeless guy carrying a garbage bag full of his wordly possessions, and the group of black folks. We sat down, me in the front, the homeless guy in the middle, and the group of black folks in the back. The movie started.

The first graphic sex scene shown in the film portrayed a heterosexual couple engaged in acrobatic positions and lots of moaning. And we all loved it! The folks in the back were cheering, and I was laughing. We really enjoyed it.

But the gay sex scenes didn’t go over so well. I liked them, the homeless guy liked them (I think, judging by his head nodding), but the black folks in the back weren’t so thrilled. In fact, they elicited little more than nervous silence and the occasional “Man, this movie is freaky”, or “They did NOT just show his ass, oh man… is he… awww, maaaaannn…” But hey, that was just the people who were talking. I’m sure some of the more quiet folks in the back enjoyed them.

The movie pretty much vacillated between those two poles. I liked the storyline, but the bum fell asleep, and the black folks at the back of the theater just didn’t seem to have much interest in a bunch of white, upper-class, self-obsessed New Yorkers. By the end they had pretty much lost interest, talking to each other and only perking up for the orgy scenes, which were, by and large, pretty great. Oh, and they did NOT approve of the naked obese man holding the naked skinny man. The folks in the back did not like that AT ALL.

So, overall, I don’t think that Mr. Mitchell’s movie really speaks to the folks who saw the movie with me, although I wouldn’t make the ludicrous misstep of ASSUMING that it won’t play to the black community at large.

Instead I will make my own prediction, based on my own ignorance:

Mr. Mitchell’s Shortbus will not play well to the black community at large.

So thank you, my black movie watching compatriots, for reminding me that my own movie watching occupies a pretty sheltered cultural perspective, one that doesn’t exactly speak to a lot of people outside of certain progressive subcultures. And thanks, also, for not raising too big a stink during the explicit gay sex scenes. I apologize for the behavior of the ushers at the Ritz Five theater, and I hope you will continue to make appearances at the Ritz Five on Wednesdays so I can have friends to see movies with, and will no longer have to refer to you as “the black folks”, which can easily be construed as VERY RACIST, because I will have learned your names.

Jackie Wilson: Greatest Soul Singer of All Time?

I understand that the title above is ample evidence of my famous capacity for overstatement, and I want to point out that the question mark was added intentionally, because Lord knows I’m not quite certain of the statement myself. I mean, Jackie Wilson better than Sam Cooke? Better than Solomon Burke? This Wilson fellow better be really something, right? In fact, he better have a voice that can move stony mountains to the brink of tears.
Now, add to all this doubt a few obvious facts about Jackie Wilson: he was (especially compared to Cooke and Burke) a pretty shitty seller of records. Half of the music he recorded doesn’t even really count as soul, coming down squarely on the saccharine side of commercial pop, with wooden rhythms and Disney-style backing vocals. There isn’t an ounce of political import in his entire recorded catalogue, nothing close to “A Change is Gonna Come”. And once he was shot in 1961 (by a jealous lover), Wilson only put out one great song, “Higher and Higher”.
But there’s one thing about Jackie Wilson that puts all of these considerations to bed, in my estimation, and that’s the absolutely ridiculous power of his voice. Not just that he could hit those high notes, or that he could jump octaves and trill and all those things that are technically impressive. He had some weird, almost absurd quality in his tremolo, and some inability to let any note lie flat. There are no relaxed spots in a Jackie Wilson vocal line, everything ends up in the red.
Take his signature tune, “Lonely Teardrops”, written by Berry Gordy (who went on to found Motown records). What could have been a middling soul tune in someone else’s mouth is transformed, through the rubber-band quality of Wilson’s pipes, into some kind of transcendental moment of emotional release. When he hits the bridge, and the band drops out behind him, he manages to sound for all the world as if his lover’s leaving him is actually going to cause him to keel over and die of loneliness. And there are precious few soul singers who can do that.
In fact, Wilson actually died singing “Lonely Teardrops”. He had a heart attack on-stage.
So I would argue for Jackie Wilson being the best soul singer of all time. Not the best soul artist, or the owner of the best soul song. I think Jackie Wilson spent his whole career fighting saccharine arrangements by producers who wanted him to be a pop-star, clumsy backing bands, and questionable marketing choices, all for the privelige of bestowing upon the record-buying public the gifts of his glorious voice. If you doubt me, listen to “Lonely Teardrops”.
I bet you can pinpoint the spot where he had the heart attack.