what happens to ross and rachel--wait, don't tell me

how come nobody told me that alec baldwin was blogging for huffpo? between this and yelling at his daughter, how does he have time for anything else?

Ride it, Donaghy--Ride it Straight to Hell

Having been inefficient and distracted all day, I decided to stick it out in the office a bit longer tonight. I was plugging along before the ground--or rather the 34 floors of building beneath me--shook, and you know, it's true: you can take the kid out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the kid; Hand to God, my first thought was maybe that was the F-train passing by.

The One Less Traveled By, At Least in Velcro Shoes

So, I've been measuring the value of my life by how bloggy it's been lately. Even when I was studying for the dread pirate Bar Exam, I had stuff to say, but this long spiral into gainfully employed machinehood hasn't quite had the same effect. At one point last week, I even typed a dramatic screed against the Oakland Public Works Agency for their preoposterous, pro-environmental policies: if your grabage doesn't fit entirely within the miniature garbage cans they've issued you, they don't take it; if your broken mop handle protrudes from the top, they take it out and leave it on the sidewalk--then challenge you to schedule an additional pick-up with them at the rate of $6 per item/bag. Can you imagine this happening in New York? One Friday night, this tyranny led me to the ignominy of having to pile trash into my car and unload it into a dumpster in an abandoned part of town. Sorry, that was screed redux.

Anyway, I haven't had a whole lot to say. Job's been okay; not much to report. I did call my boss Matt the other day, though his name's Mike. That wasn't smooth, but one of my colleagues set me at ease: "90% of the people here mispronounce your name. What's the big deal?" During my BART commute in the morning, I've been reading Revolutionary Road and trying to tell myself that the protagonist--a 29-year-old corporate commuter with vanquished hopes and dreams--is not the cause for the clanging in my soul.

Alas, in the absence of any other fascinating bits to share, I share yet another sartorial question: Can I bring back velcro? Or would doing so be a gross mismeasure of footwear irony? See above.

the way we were

as i mentioned in a previous post, i've been rather out of the music scene of late. i'm just kind of bored by it. my chief complaint is that these new bands don't seem very consistent. case in point - tapes n tapes. their first album was great. then i went to see them in concert and yeah, maybe it was the fact that i was one of the only people over 25, but it kind of blew. so badly that i had to leave in the middle. they tried songs off their new album and it was some horrifying hybrid of sublime and, hmmm, live. yeah. that sounds about right. maybe i'm just getting old and i need to revive my rick astley collection or something? hey rick, turns out i won't ever give you up.

stay with me here, but what's fred armisen all about? where did this dude come from? how did he end up creating this new site with one of the sleater kinneys? anyway, i started listening to the woods this morning and it made me wish for a giant reunion tour--sleater-kinney and pavement. i'll throw built to spill in there, too, although i'm pretty sure they're still together. i'll pretend i'm still 20 and afraid to go to alphabet city.

what's that you say, sasha frere jones?

btw, c4ts - why do magazines in asia always have white women (and blondes, at that) on the cover? shit makes me ill.

how about this one?

it's no hibernol, but still pretty good.

Wedding Video

Hey, our wedding video came back. Thanks to Dr. G for putting this together.

publications of no interest to me

on my plane ride back from ottawa, i was seated next to a very elderly gentleman (who, as it turns out, was an ambassador. unfortch, i didn't catch his name). he was very kind and we made polite conversation, but i really wanted to know more about was his reading material, no joke, "wooden boats".

whenever anyone would mention the recent "credit crunch" at work, i'd respond, "oh yeah", nod in acknowledgment, while thinking to myself "i don't know what that means". with that in mind, i attempted to read this very tedious article about the credit market, when i came across the following:

Merrill Lynch was by far the biggest issuer, underwriting $54 billion last year, almost twice as much as in 2005, according to Asset-Backed Alert, a trade publication.

sure enough, this thing actually exists.

a case i was reading a long time ago name-checked a trade magazine called "macaroni journal", a trade publication devoted to semolina flour products. hmm, i would've read that, i suppose.

The Dimunition of the American Dream

Today, a fiercely racially divided state, one where virulent Jim Crowe values thrive in the cloth of a fictional Christ, the site of a monumental natural disaster, a place that makes a habit of choosing megalomaniacs, incompetents, and hypocrites for its highest offices elected (by-all-accounts) an astonishingly brilliant and industrious South Asian man to be its governor. In many ways, Bobby Jindal's achievement--and his achievements to date--are staggering. At 24, seeking a post-Rhodes Scholarship challenge, he was appointed to be the Secretary of Lousisiana's Department of Health & Hospitals. At 32 he took Kathleen Blanco to task in a hard-fought gubernatorial contest, losing only because of the color of his skin. A few weeks later, he won David Vitter's congressional seat. And now at 36, he has burnished his conservative credentials, and has become the governor of a sinking swampland.

I guess I'm experiencing that same numb confusion that Mexican-Americans felt when they witnessed Alberto Gonzales morph into the President's torture lapdog, the same hollowness of stomach black Americans felt beholding an obviously paranoid Clarence Thomas dismiss institutional racism as the crutch of the lazy. But what does it say about the American dream when the first guy who looks like me to win state-wide office does so after changing his name from Piyush to Bobby, does so after abandoning his parents' Hindusim for a belief system that disallows for abortion even when a woman's life may be in danger, does so after lurching even further right after his 2003 defeat and ceding the black vote altogether, in favor of rural white approval?

Some will say today is a marvelous day for people of my color--the American Dream is reborn with Bobby Jindal. Others know the American Dream is entombed with Bobby Kennedy.

it's that time of year again

RIP chris farley et phil hartman.

average white band

c4ts, i know you started a new job and all, but have you read this week's new yorker? aka the "arts" issue? anyway, i direct your attention to two articles in particular: your fave sasha frere-jones yet again fretting, this time about the state of indie rock, and the profile of david simon. hmm, now that i think about it, did you edit this issue?

no matter. the simon profile managed to combine all of my interests in one neat package: a temperamental protagonist (simon), a dramatically decaying city (baltimore), and rare insight into how the "vows" column works (connections). yeah, i know, virtually everyone i know is freaking obsessed with the wire. why aren't i on board? what can i say. i'm often a late adopter (and have pretty pedestrian tastes) when it comes to tv. indeed, confession time. i've never seen a single episode of the sopranos, yet this onion article made me reminisce like nobody's business.

oh uncle jesse! remember the time your girlfriend rescued DJ from her imminent eating disorder? i do!

now to turn my attention to frere-jones' article. i know that most critics just sound like people lamenting the days of yore (to wit, yet another whiny piece from david denby), but he really aggravates me. i can't disparage his article entirely since i've been rather bored by the music scene of late myself, but he essentially blames the whitewashing of indie rock on pavement? really? what about nirvana? kurt cobain certainly wasn't "miscegenating" in his albums and nirvana are far more influential and widely imitated than pavement.

second confession time: i love pavement. no doubt. and i'm definitely going to raise c4ts's ire here, but something about malkmus' brilliant privileged-white-man-insouciance just got to me. when i read in the table of contents that sasha frere-jones was gonna write on why indie rock was so white, i thought he was referring to its target and actual audience. bc they're white.

but you know, what the new yorker taketh away with one hand, they giveth with another bc the same issue managed to rescue me with its article on the internets and classical music. i don't like schoenberg much, aside from transfigured night. who the eff actually listens to pierrot lunaire? be real, snobs. who doesn't like a little tonality. anyway, how can you not love the fact you can find archived letters of him writing to the ford motor dealership about his car's failing cooling system? i wish there were a blog devoted to brilliant people doing quotidian things. i'd totally read that.

while researching something else altogether, i came across this wikipedia entry. one of my favorites will be posted in a bit.

[Ed note: an apt and hilarious image will be uploaded later. blogger issues.]

update: apparently this sasha frere-jones article annoyed many in the (gag) blogosphere.

yet another update: you know i had a dream last night (for real) that someone commented on my posts? HINT HINT. anyway, this slate article sums up my frustrations at SFJ better than my own post.

high fivin' white guys

thank god for youtube. this is one of my favorite skits from one of my favorite local comedy programs back in the day. this kind of sums up the early 90s for me. this and flannel.

i'm popular conan, i'm popular

at around 4pm on thursday i was told that i would have to go to my nation's capital the next morning, so i duly awoke at 6am on friday and hopped on a plane. on my way to the airport, i heard that al gore won the nobel prize. i have to say that i was pretty damn moved by this inspirational story of a man who overcame his disheveled obesity to find his true voice.

anyway, good times in ottawa. saw the parliament buildings, read up on some mining shiz, filled up on some tim horton's. the next morning i awoke to see a poster for this masterpiece advertised in the hotel lobby and i thought, holy shit, my first time here and i'm going to see jean chretien? yeah, turns out i was wrong; it was just a media event, as a random female journalist told me. she was pretty psyched i'd heard of her publication, the epoch times. believe me, nobody was more surprised than i at remembering that name.

for some inexplicable reason, ottawa was teeming with asian tourists. loads of them everywhere--old asian couples getting off tour buses, young presumptively japanese girls with their cameras, etc. despite the general soporific tenor of the city, i felt pleasantly at home. of course, that was until some french (french-canadian?) tourist pointed at me and said something, loudly, along the lines of "blahblahblah japonais" and the fact the canadian dollar--the canadian dollar!--was worth more than its american counterpart.

update: this just in--turns out the boss (about whom i wrote a lengthy and shitty modern music paper in college) was in ottawa last night! and covered arcade fire! mind ~~blown~~. i like that stereogum assumes that all of its readers are retarded and calls the arena "ontario's scotiabank place". that'd be like saying "michigan's joe louis arena".

god, i love me some bruce.

Modelling for Lane Bryant

This is the most confusing Times headline I've seen in a while. What, they're trying to distance themselves from the Anna Nicole story now? Umm, yeah, there's like some inquiry into the death of a "model" or something, we don't really know. Anna Nicole was a model like I play wide receiver for the Redskins, Bill Keller. That kind of feigned disinterest might work if not for the fact that you guys fawned over this non-story like every other tabloid out there. Somebody needs to bulldoze the Times building and turn it into the biggest Lane Bryant in midtown.

ps --California AG (and ex-everything else) Jerry Brown and Joe Biden, separated at birth...and by a few hair plugs?

Skanks and Jaeger Bombs

The Wire -- January 2008

I thought the free Radiohead was all the joy my computer could provide me with this week, but then The Wire promo dropped on the New York Magazine site. The teaser's devoid of clips from the upcoming season, it embraces West B'more's vampiric loathing of dawn, and it tells of McNulty's pending release from his teetotaling cage. The slow decay of urban America never sounded so good.

Last Days of Disco

So, my long summer vacation's starting to wrap up. Radiohead's playing over the end credits, as I struggle in vain to get Comcast to correct their spelling of my first name (no, it's not "Adios.") As of Monday I rejoin the ranks of the gainfully employed (and health-insured). But I've learned quite a bit in my time off. For instance, did you know The Hills is fake? Sadly, with great knowledge come soul-rattling questions too: like, umm, wtfuck is up with Michel Gondry's new movie? And w(ho)tfuck is Bobby Trendy, and why didn't anybody tell me about him before?

what the fuck is david brooks yapping about

what's with david brooks? how's this guy an expert on anything? i guess i find him mildly entertaining on shields & brooks, but most of the time he seems to be reporting from a vacuum. so he writes this op-ed today in the times about how people in their 20s seem to be less and less inclined to follow the "traditional" march into adulthood. alright, i'm on board. sounds good. then he starts to lose me:

Dating gives way to Facebook and hooking up. Marriage gives way to cohabitation. Church attendance gives way to spiritual longing. Newspaper reading gives way to blogging. (In 1970, 49 percent of adults in their 20s read a daily paper; now it’s at 21 percent.)

what the hell is he talking about? i understand that some of this is hyperbole, but could this column be any more plodding? who is his audience? oh man, it gets even weirder!

This has fundamentally scrambled the courtship rituals and decreased the pressure to get married. Educated women can get many of the things they want (income, status, identity) without marriage, while they find it harder (or, if they’re working-class, next to impossible) to find a suitably accomplished mate.

it's not news, it's not opinion, it's not fact...i don't know what that is. and the best yet:

Rather, what we’re seeing is the creation of a new life phase, just as adolescence came into being a century ago. It’s a phase in which some social institutions flourish — knitting circles, Teach for America — while others — churches, political parties — have trouble establishing ties.

knitting circles?! can i get paid to write this shit? please? and to conclude...

And as the new generational structure solidifies, social and economic entrepreneurs will create new rites and institutions. Someday people will look back and wonder at the vast social changes wrought by the emerging social group that saw their situations first captured by “Friends” and later by “Knocked Up.”

come back, timesselect! if i had submitted something like this in college, nay, middle school, i think it would've been returned to me with "THESIS?" in giant red letters along the front.

anyway, this reminds me. i was reading some article entitled, "why is bob herbert boring?" while chuckling to myself bc, let's face it, he is! the sad part is that he is so relevant and almost always right, yet i never feel compelled to read his artcles. and sure enough, the day after i giggled through that column, i saw this.

in the papers

a host of bummers in the news of late: the SCHIP debacle and the bush administration's shocking (i know i should expect this by now, but i didn't realize health insurance for children would generate so much resentment) veto, marion jones and 'roids, just how much of a sycophant gonzales was, bloomberg still being a sexist dick...le sigh.

BUT the greatest night of the year swooped in and rescued me. and you know what, alessandra stanley? jack donaghy isn't always "infalliable". remember jack-tor?! yeah, eat it. i do read the paper.

Blonde Ambition

On the heels of the Orange Revolution and the Yuschenko face-paralyzing poison debacle, the VH1 "reality" show script-writers who obviously pull all the strings behind the scenes at the Ukrainian political farce have just pulled off their latest amazing plot twist: apparently, Sienna Miller just got elected Prime Minister, what?