Listless.

Every stupid year at this time I feel as if I need to make lists of my favorite records. I never get around to doing it, of course. A lot of that is because I'm the biggest procrastinator that ever waited till tomorrow to procrastinate. But some of it is also because I'm not quite sure I understand the whole list-making thing.

One of my favorite songs this year, for instance, is Peanut's "Come Tomorrow," a song that I heard on the compilation Dream Babes Vol. 3 -- which was issued in 2001. And did I mention it's a compilation of the 60s Brit girl sound? The song dates to 1967; I would have given it the thumbs-up then, but I didn't even have opposable thumbs yet. Is it on My List? If I'm making it by the unspoken list-making rules, then I'm supposed to leave it off, because I believe such lists are for others to read and implicitly admire, and that admiration would just be shot if they knew you only discovered some records this year that weren't actually made in 2003. If I'm making the list for myself then it would go on, since it does remind me of 2003. But why am I making a list for myself? I forget. I should make a list of the reasons to make a list.

Wait, why did I say I had two reasons for not making a list again?

I did think that it might be kind of funny, instead of making a list of my favorite records, to compile a list of best and worst critics' lists. A list of lists! Full of cutting remarks about music snobbery and/or imbecility! I might have rolled around on the floor for a full minute at the rollickingly clever nature of that idea.

Unfortunately, this idea was defeated by:

(1) the fact that it would have been quite an undertaking -- not so much the reading, which I was doing anyway, but the compiling and snarking, which frankly is too much work. Especially on New Year's Eve. It's the last day of the year. I'm allowed to be lazy. Lazier. Whatev.

(2) how all the lists blurred together anyway. The slightly dreary White Stripes are everywhere, and you certainly can't shake a Polaroid picture without hitting Outkast. The other usual suspects include Radiohead, Blur, the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Thrills, Elbow, and Broken Social Scene (which I actually bought, because I like the other bands that its members are in -- but clearly this was the "non-commercial," aka snoozeworthy outlet for their creative energies). Most generalist publications also make a concessionary nod or two to a danceish album every year, and this year the popular pick seems to be Basement Jaxx (which is only an ok album to me -- as neat as it is to hear JC Chasez imploring us to "plug it in! plug it in!", I can't sing along without feeling as if I'm shilling for air fresheners), or Dizzee Rascal if they feel naughty. If the critic fancies himself even more adventurous, then he could also go for (a) Manitoba, (b) Prefuse 73, or (c) Four Tet.

It's not so much that I don't like most of these artists and their music. Well, that's true too: if I did make a list, the only critics' faves on it would probably be Fountains "best new artist...since 1996" of Wayne, Rufus Wainwright, Postal Service, and maaaaybe Death Cab for Cutie. It's more that, given the variety of music out there, shouldn't we be worried, or even shocked, that so many albums pop up repeatedly? I've met two-headed coin tosses that are less predictable.

Anyway, stay tuned. I may still come up with a best-of list. Or not. With wild and crazy me, you never know.

(3) my realization that it's a shit concept.

Finally, why on Jesus's green earth is there an ad for a "Dysphagia Cup" on my site? What is a "Dysphagia Cup"? Oh, it's for people who "have difficulty swallowing." That wouldn't be me then.

Posted at 7:59 PM ||

 
Trick question.

Scene: bar. A rubbishy gay boy, at the top of his shrieking, histrionic voice: "Let's play a game! Who can guess how many drinks I've had? IS ZIT MY 2ND? That's weird. IS ZIT MY 5TH? Also weird. MY 7TH? MY 9TH? Whoever guess right, I will buy him a drink!" Translation: am I a drunken asshole, or just naturally one?

Posted at 11:56 PM ||

 
And believe me, I know from awkward positions.

Excepting only the proctologist's table, I find the chair at my hairdresser's -- or, to be more specific, my hairwasher's -- to be the most harrowing seat in the house.

I'm not talking about physical discomfort, although that's part of it too. In that almost-horizontal position, with my head tilted back and hanging over a sink while suds inch their insidious way towards my eyes, my Audrey Hepburnesque neck exposed for the world to see, I am allowing anyone to come right up to me and just. Cut. My. Throat. Although, you know, it's entirely possible that I'm the only person with such paranoid thoughts. But even if the threat of danger isn't real, it's certainly not my best angle. But then again very few upside down faces are especially fetching (*cough*Steve Buscemi*cough*).

No, the discomfort is subtler. There are two women I tend to draw for the hairwashing assignment. One is lovely -- good wrist action, not overly-sharp fingernails, good job gauging water temperature, and quite the scalp massager, if I may say so. She and I have innocuous but pleasant conversations; she used to live where my parents do, so when we exhaust the chitchat about the weather and the busy-ness of the salon, there's always that ("How's the old neighborhood?" "Good." "Good."). One time we did start conversing about vacation and travel, but somewhere along the way things took a wrong turn and she started relating the tale of how a friend of her brother's went mountain climbing, got struck by lightning, and how her brother broke down and cried when he saw the "completely charred" body. I think she could see me swallowing nervously while grasping for a suitable response, mostly because my Adam's apple was right in her face. We learned our lesson after that.

The other woman is scarier. She's never met a blast of ice-cold water that she didn't like, and her finger goes just a little too far when rinsing out the area around and in my ears. Dialogue-wise, we have no reliable fallback, so every conversation is a bit of a minefield. Yesterday we did yak about the weather, and then she said something to the other woman working beside her. At this crucial juncture, I zoned out for a second and thus had no earthly idea if she then switched back to talking to me. "Crucial," because she was suddenly musing graphically about food that didn't quite agree, possibly right at that moment, with her stomach, but I didn't know whether to cluck with sympathy, or if she was sharing something private with a co-worker that wasn't meant for me. But I guess if it was the latter she would have just stuck both her fingers in my ears.

I really should have started my patronage of this salon by pretending not to speak the language. Too late now, I suppose.

Separated at their satanic births.

Since we are on the subject of hair, I should also record how freaked out I am by a TV ad for a Japanese hair product. It consists of three men with bizarre split Mohawks, singing, "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hair." And then their huge Mohawks part, and...clap. You can see the ad here (it's second from the top, although the others are pretty damn strange too), but only if you can afford to miss a good night's sleep.

Posted at 5:04 PM ||

 
I'm creeping myself out. I'm sure you know how that feels.

More proof that Brittle Lemon has magical powers: I just noticed that they're showing Home Alone 2 on TV tonight. Serendipity. Which is also the title of the movie I watched a few nights ago.

Blogods, if you're out there, make sure you don't miss this entry.

Posted at 1:34 PM ||

 
My life for a song (IV):
"All alone on Christmas," Darlene Love.

John Hughes and Macaulay Culkin have a lot to answer for: my uncontrollable desire to punch every Edvard Munch painting in the face; defining humor as "repeated blows to Joe Pesci's balls"; and, well, Macaulay Culkin. But if a defense lawyer ever needs to plead their case, she could do worse than point to how Home Alone 2 did at least provide us with a spectacular Christmas song: Darlene Love's "All Alone On Christmas."

The Christmas song that Love is actually much better known for is "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)." First appearing in 1963 as a 7" single (yeah -- ask your parents) and on the album A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector, the song has been famous in recent years as the one seasonal tune that David Letterman doesn't think is complete (Santa) pants. Indeed, since 1986, Love has been invited onto Dave's show every year to perform the song, and she always does a fantastic job. There's some debate about when exactly Mariah Carey became certifiable -- the gigglish striptease on TRL? the paranoid messages on her website? Glitter? -- but I think that one fine day in 1994, when she decided to apply her dulcet dolphin tones to the Love classic, merits serious consideration.

Anyway, I no longer live in a place where I can watch Dave's show (we get only Jay, a fate worse than, well, watching Jay), so although I see from his website that Love made her 19th appearance yesterday, I was not privy. (I also miss seeing Rupert G sticking his meatball on top of Dave's tree, which is not as dirty as it sounds.) Thus snubbed, I can perhaps be forgiven for choosing this year to confess that I have come to prefer "All Alone On Christmas" -- which I think I first heard (notice how I am burying this in a convoluted subordinate clause) when they screened Home Alone 2 on TV as I was filled with too much Christmas spirit(s), because how else can I explain my viewing of it? No, really, I'm asking: how? -- to its better known cousin.

This preference should be hard to defend. "All Alone" is for all intents and purposes a copy of "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)": kindred lonely-at-Christmas scenarios; similar wall of sound productions; the same namechecking of other Christmas songs (a reference to "All I want for Christmas is you" in the former song, and a line about how "they're singing 'Deck the Halls'" in the latter). Actually, I find the namecheck in "All Alone" cuter for being all meta: "Do you remember sleigh riding in the snow/And dancing all night to 'Baby, Please Come Home'?" Unfortunately, the other reference -- a sax solo, presumably by Clarence Clemons, that interpellates a bit of "Jingle Bells" -- is as cheesy as all hell.

But then again, how could you not love "All Alone"? First, it is written by Steven "Silvio" Van Zandt. Reason enough. Sure, he was all "now I'm being Bruce Springsteen's second bandana" at the time, but he can still beat your face in whenever.

You better not be fuckin' alone for fuckin' Christmas.

A less cowed reason to like the song is the sheer joy of it all. Looking at the title of the tune, and of this entry, you probably think that I am a poor, sad sap who is currently curled up in a fetal position under the Christmas tree. That's not entirely true (I've been too busy crying to get a tree), and Love's song actually makes me feel happy. Yes, the lyric is certainly gloomy on paper: "The cold wind is blowin' and the streets are getting dark"; "I get a little lonely every year around this time"; "tell me, I gotta know, where do lonely hearts go?"

But set to Silvio's faux-Spector production (oh, by the way, best album title this year? Phil's Spectre: A Wall of Soundalikes), the song to my ears is just ecstasy. Music history is full of Christmas songs -- not to mention songs in general -- that sound joyous when they are lyrically sad, and vice-versa, and I have always liked that juxtaposition. In its original war-torn context (Meet Me in Saint Louis), for instance, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is absolutely forlorn, and much disco has a strong sense of melancholy. I know that there's a musical explanation for why, sonically, something sounds happy -- songs written in a minor key sound sadder than those in major keys, yes? -- but I couldn't tell you which "All Alone" is in even if it arrived at my door hooked up to a keychain marked "It's C major, stupid."

All I know is that singing along to the chorus makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside -- unless that's bad eggnog speaking -- and do things to ensure that, even if I were alone physically, I'm not emotionally. Because, while Love may be lonely, her implicit invitation to us to chant along to the chorus somehow makes it less a lament and more a wish that "nobody ought to be alone on Christmas." The word for that, I guess, is "hope."

Merry Christmas, everyone.


This has been a entry. All lyrics are the property and copyright of their respective owners, and are provided for educational purposes and personal use only.

Posted at 9:01 PM ||

 
Before Christmas comes boxing day.

The festive and joyous practice that is Christmas gift-giving poses an especial challenge when the lucky recipients of your generosity are faraway, and thus can only be reached through the miracle that is the postal service. Your challenge is multi-faceted.

1. Unlike the lucky bastards who have until Christmas Eve -- and often beyond, since the smarter ones will always attempt to stagger the Annual Seeing Of The Family -- to finish their shopping, you who need to mail simply must take into consideration that thing called mailing time. This, apparently, can vary anywhere from 10 days, to 68. Why not keep this in mind, and shop and then send early?

Of course, even if you begin shopping on Boxing Day for next year, you still only have 354 days, compared to everyone else's 364. So it's still cosmically unfair, and please don't argue about the math. Inevitably, your gifts will arrive at least 10 days late. You can sometimes get away with this by claiming that your indeterminate religion prohibits you from celebrating Christmas, and these are New Year gifts -- but only if you don't forget this excuse and turn around and ask your loved ones, "Where are my Christmas presents?"

2. If you are sending a bunch of little gifts and thus must pack them into a larger, meta box, the challenge increases in complexity. Let's assume you don't have time to make your own paper, which you will then use to make your own box; instead, you have decided to buy the meta box from the PO, which does offer enough boxes to beguile Pandora.

Martha has a box for you.

At this point, you have to determine if you want (a) to make a special trip there to pick up a box, bring it home and pack it; or if you would prefer (b) to bring all your gifts to the PO and pick out the box there and then. The first approach offers the advantage of allowing you to pack the box in peace, but it is highly possible that you will somehow select the wrong-sized box. Several times. The second approach, on the other hand, means you only have to stand in line once, but a decided drawback is that you will have to show the entire world exactly what you, at some shopping-crazed moment in your life, thought would make good gifts. In addition, taking the time to see which box will best contain all your gifts might earn you Looks from the impatient little busybodies in line behind you, so do wear clothes that deflect such daggers.

3. Option (a) it is, then: go to the PO, stand in line, purchase three boxes of different sizes "just in case," trudge home with them. You are now ready to see if your various little whimsical presents will fit into the meta box. Maybe they almost do. The one exception is the lovely gift that came in its own pretty little ployfoam box, which is just an inch larger than it needs to be. You might think that using a box cutter to shave off that pesky inch is a great idea, because it will allow you to keep the gift in its more-or-less original packaging and yet fit it into the meta box. But this would be because you somehow are too stupid to remember that box cutter + foam = little white bits everywhere. Still, if you close your eyes and somehow stop the screaming voices in your head long enough, you can almost pretend it's just snow.

Posted at 11:45 PM ||

 
Blah Sabbath.

If you have been reading my recent entries, you would be under the impression that I lead quite the glamorous life, killing geckos and hanging out in parking lots. Alas, I'm not always that fabulous. To wit: here's my Sunday.

It seems that Brittle Lemon has magical powers, because writing about stuff makes it happen. Hence, my account of void deck activities first makes me sick, and now, there is indeed a wedding going on downstairs this weekend. They set up the reception area yesterday -- it must have taken all of 10 minutes -- and this morning the strains of "I don't wanna miss a thing," as lovingly rendered by a cat with electrodes attached to his testicles, tells me that the union is well and truly on. I would have gone down to wish the happy couple a long and fruitful marriage, except I was still fuckin' asleep. Who gets married at...noon, anyway?

If I was going to be awakened before my time, I thought that I might as well put the TV on and move to the couch. Wouldn't want to start the day too strenuously, and you know there's bound to be something good on Sunday afternoons. Before you go and set up a pot underneath that sentence to catch the dripping sarcasm, I must admit that the TV stations here don't do too badly when, instead of screening something current and buzzworthy, they resort to shows that everywhere else in the world are dead and gone. In other words, when they just give up. Sometimes that works for me: on weekends one station treats me to the heartwarming Italian-American hijinks of That's Life, which I sporadically watched in the US, circa 2000. On Saturday nights. I had no life then, either. Oddly enough, on this episode José Zuniga appears in a new recurring role as a busboy (mmm, dishy!) -- and, wahey, he was just in the film I re-watched last night , if you want to talk about coincidences.

Then I flip over to National Geographic and catch a show called Chasing Time, which is actually kind of interesting, although it mostly made me miss the wonderful Amazing Race. A team of two contestants has to run around a selected city and complete a series of challenges (messaged to them on their cell phones) within 12 hours, in order to win a trip back to the city. This ep was set in Istanbul, and one attraction they showed was Miniaturk, that frankly bizarre park that contains scaled-down replicas of various Turkish monuments. It's like someone read Julian Barnes’s England, England...but missed the scathing social critique and took it as a DIY manual, that is.

How was your day?

Posted at 10:31 PM ||

 
Aversion therapy.

This afternoon, in response to strange stimuli, I had an odd little flashback to a dumb dog I once knew. I was walking across an open parking lot, a little lost in the process of making a mental Christmas shopping list. Diagonally from, and thus walking towards, me was a man who I began to notice was staring at me quite intently. There was head swiveling and everything. Before your mind Goes There -- and I know it will, because it practically Lives There -- I don't think it was a cruisy kind of look, although I'm hard pressed to characterize it exactly: it was neither aggressive, nor sexual, but some weird, bordering-on-rude look of overwhelming, all-consuming interest.

Just how all-consuming became clear in the next minute. Unlike me, who was crossing the carpark, this man was walking in the middle of it. As he continued to stare and I continued to try to not give much of a fuck, a car had pulled out of its lot and was now slowly driving right behind Staring Boy. The driver was patiently expecting human speedbump to, at any moment, realize that he was in the way. When a few seconds elapsed without this desired outcome, the driver finally leaned on his horn.

In that moment, as I tried my best not to laugh out loud, the sudden memory of the dog I used to know, some years ago, popped into my mind. "Used to know" is putting it too strongly, because I only had the pleasure of his canine acquaintance once, and while I remember what breed he was -- a spaniel, maybe cocker -- I have no real memory of his dad's species. It is entirely possible that said dad was, um, a transient friend.

But let's fade in on him, transience notwithstanding, and I, coming into his house and plonking ourselves down on his couch. The dog comes ambling up, all curious about this new person in his personal space. My friend at that point gets up to, I don't know, slip into...to fetch me a drink, and says something to the effect that "oh, my dog's shy but friendly." He was: the cute dog feigned disinterest while keeping a cautious eye on me and inching ever closer. I see. Playing it cool. Not to be outdone, I leaned back and held out a hand -- just so, casually. In case he wanted to sniff my limb and pat me down for weapons.

Before long, the dog had made his way to under the coffee table, which was one of those slightly tacky ones with a glass top. My hand was still nonchalantly extended, and finally he comes up and his nose gives it a careful but quite enthused once-over.

I thought I had proven my trustworthiness by then, so I stopped reclining in the couch and instead leaned forward, all ready to show my mad petting skillz. The dog was concentrating on my outstretched hand, so I guess as far as he was concerned this meant that the hitherto inert and friendly human hand was suddenly coming right at him. Eek. Well, skittish spaniel was just a little startled; he stopped bending over to inspect my hand and quickly tried to back away. Except that in his haste, he lifted his head too fast and, BOINK! Totally bumped his head on the underside of the table coffee -- the table with the glass top that afforded me a good view of this little slapstick routine.

His dad chose this moment to come back into the room; the BOINK! had sounded shockingly loud to my ears, so I half expected it to be what brought him back. But the dog was barking and growling at me, while simultaneously trying to plead his case to his dad.

Dad: Hey! What’s with the barking and growling?
Dog: Hraf! Hraf!! Growl! Hraf! Grrrrowl. Hraf!!!
Dad: I'm sorry. He's usually very friendly. I don't know why he's behaving this way.
Me, in my head: Notmyfaultnotmyfaultnotmyfault.
Me, aloud: I have no idea either.

But back to this afternoon, and the carpark. When the driver leaned on his horn, Staring Boy almost jumped out of his skin. Then, a little dazed and confused, he spun around a little towards the car to register his awareness of it, and a vague sense of apology, and then turned back around towards me. Or maybe he doesn't really know which way he's facing at this point. Anyway, Near Roadkill Boy now GLARES at me, like it's all MY FAULT. But that's ok, cause I had by then two memories to entertain me as I went on my merry way.

Posted at 10:20 PM ||

 
My life, and its soundtrack (III):
"Transatlanticism," Death Cab for Cutie.

I came to Death Cab for Cutie, as I do so many things, ass backwards. Sometime in the middle of the year I discovered the fabulous album Give Up by The Postal Service, which is likely to end up as one of my favorite records of the year. The synthpoppy outfit is something of a side project, made up as it is of Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello, both of whom have more full-time bands: in the case of Tamborello, Dntel, while Gibbard fronts Death Cab. Although the latter has been around for a while at the periphery of my barely-consciousness, I never paid much heed. (For one thing, I thought the name was stupid. Still do. And yes, I know about the Magical Mystery Tour reference. Still stupid.) But I liked Give Up enough that when, a few months later, Death Cab released its new album, Transatlanticism, I checked out Gibbard's earlier band. Since I am such a disco king (I said "king"; shut up), I don't quite like the indie-rock stylings of Death Cab as much as I do The Postal Service -- melancholia is much better served up in electronica -- but Transatlanticism is still a very good album.

Death Cab is sometimes classified as "emo rock." Aside from the question of what that means, and whether Death Cab should be categorized thus, and zzzz, some people -- many stricken by the tragic inability to spell -- seem to object to the very label itself: how can there be an offshoot of punk rock that is emotional, when emotions (not to be confused with emoticons) are for faggots? My much-less-sophisticated problem is that I start thinking of music made by Muppets when I hear "emo rock." But all of that is neither here nor there -- whether or not Death Cab is "emo," their work is often talked about as being just a teensy bit overwrought; even critics who like them bring up the charge, if only to dismiss, or defend them against it.

The title track of the album, which for me is the highlight and thus on repeated play, probably lends itself most to such charges. There's much about the song that is excessive, beginning with the fact that it's almost 8 minutes long. Musically, though it begins quite simply -- with a chugging but soft, shuffle beat, mimicking a train engine, carried over from the previous track, over which a piano tinkles prettily -- the whole thing does build up into a massive rock ballad that Freddie Mercury (may he and his leotards rest in peace) himself might have arranged.

But for me what makes the song a bit too much -- and I mean that in the nicest possible way -- is the lyric. On a first listen, "Transatlanticism" tells a fairly straightforward tale: it's a love song about a long distance relationship, which thus ends with Gibbard imploringly and repeatedly singing, "I need you so much closer." (In fact, the entire CD is a bit of a concept album about physical and emotional distances, a theme set forth from the first song, "The New Year," with its touching lament: "I wish the world was flat like the old days/Then I could travel just by folding a map/No more airplanes, or speedtrains, or freeways/There'd be no distance that can hold us back.")

But a second listen shows how much more extreme the lyric is in its imagination of that distance, because in it, the narrator suggests that the curse falls on him especially heavily. His is not one of many relationships defeated by distance, but the first and originary one. "The Atlantic was born today, and I'll tell you how," Gibbard sings. The skies opened up, but instead of weeping for his plight they serve to flood the world -- originally a "perforated sphere" -- with water, creating oceans and "making islands where no island should go." It is a mythical scene: the creation of the world, no less, except that this cruel world has it in for Gibbard from the get go. Not only are there oceans that separate us, but the oceans were initially put there in order to separate us. The bastards!

This is drama queendom of the highest order, and for me makes the song fucking fantastic. What good is cheap music if not to create or call up two simultaneous, and apparently opposed feelings in us? One: to make me feel as if I am alone in my plight, that no one could possibly feel or hurt as much as I do. Two: to make us feel as if we are not alone in our plight, that the existence of, say, a song testifies to the common drama we are all going through. It's all about me -- although it doesn't have to be, either. "Transatlanticism" makes these two appeals perfectly, so if it is overwrought, I'm not sure I want to be right, baby. Especially since this is a year when several of my friends have moved, or will be moving away, and especially since it's the holiday season, when distances seem "further than ever before." Oh no, indeed.

Posted at 5:04 PM ||

 
Fire up the hibachi.

There's a dead animal somewhere in my apartment, so forgive me if I seem a little freaked. I came home to find a lizard about the size of an adult aardvark just hanging out near my kitchen door, no doubt admiring the fine nyatoh wood construction. Doing what comes naturally, I screamed like a little girl, and then ran into the kitchen for the bug spray. When I got back, Fat Lizzie had sauntered across the dining area, and was now near the day bed and loitering dangerously close to my satchel. Well, that wouldn't do -- the bag is made of fine leather, after all, and both lizard's footprints and bug spray are so hard to get out. So I maturely threw something at Fat Lizzie, and when he had scampered over to my shelves, I let loose a blast of sweet smellin' death.

Of course, that entailed my getting way too close to Fattie, so for good measure I had to scream again and run away. Mistake right there, for when I looked again at the shelves, Lizzie was nowhere to be seen. After enough time had lapsed for me to be reasonably certain that he was dead, I rattled around to try to find the carcass, but I haven't had any luck so far. Argh. Do dead lizards rot, stink, and attract vultures? Or do they dry up and stiffen, which, really, is the polite thing to do (except on first dates)?

My niece had two hamsters; her cousin recently gave her a third, one of his, apparently because it bit. Nice. Sadly, my brother-in-law left the hamster cage open shortly after, and lil’ orphan Annie took off. They haven’t found it since, and my niece is a little worried that when it does turn up, it will be bearing the bubonic plague. Then there was the time when Ikrek had her own dead lizard in her air conditioner. For those not clear about the whole concept of an air conditioner, it's what blows cold air into the apartment. Yeah. One does tend to get a whiff that there might be a dead animal that way. Things were not helped by the fact that when she called in the repairmen, the bright bulbs thought a good solution would be to spray perfume into the unit. Reptilian: A new scent by CK.

But the worst instance of an inconveniently dead animal happened to my friend Leafhead. He lives in a lovely house, and, one winter, started hearing scratching noises overhead when he was in his bedroom on the second floor. It was annoying, but he figured that either squirrels or possums had gotten into the crawlspace beneath his roof and set up home. He could live with that. Well, things took a turn for the decided worse when the possums or squirrels -- no geniuses, it would appear -- couldn't find their ways back out to shop for groceries. Soon, the pitter patter of little feet was no longer heard, but, oh, the smell. Though he is the biggest animal lover I know, Leafhead decided that there was just one available solution that did not involve ripping out the roof. So he turned up the heating to a sweltering eleven for a day. Only uncooked meat, after all, stinks.

Posted at 10:55 PM ||

 
I'm Neely O'Hara.

Maybe the gods are punishing me for joking about being at death's door in my last entry, but I've been a little under the weather. I'll pause a moment for you to sympathize.

Further, whatever illness I have seems to itself be afflicted with attention deficit disorder, because it's put me through a series of intense but short-lived symptoms that have each lasted, say, three or four hours. Sunday evening saw me all sniffly -- a real treat for Ikrek with whom I was having sushi. I think I used up all her Kleenex. This wouldn't be as disruptive if she weren't moving out of the country in about a week's time: I'm sure she had already measured and parceled out the exact amount of household goods she will need, but, thanks to me and my nose, she'll now be experiencing a severe tissue shortage in her final few days. Anyway, then on Monday morning I was all congested and sounded like Fran Leibowitz, and in the evening I was coughing up a lung. There's more, but I'll spare you because your stomach may be queasy.

I feel better today, though, because I took the miracle drug that is Alka-Seltzer Plus Night-time Cold Medicine. All praise Alka-Seltzer! The reason why I waited a few days to pop these "effervescent tablets" is because the motherfuckers are potent. You can't even get them here, which is why the drug-peddler that I am stock up when I'm elsewhere. A couple of these dolls will knock me out stone cold dead for 12 hours, and even the day after finds me as disoriented as Saddam post-spiderhole (c'mon -- you know that reference is mandatory nowadays).

I have a friend who was similarly affected the one time she took this drug -- actually, more colorfully affected, although I can't get all the details. She never tells the story in a voice that's above being a raised, traumatized whisper, and there's much furtive looking away. All I can gather is that her one dosage caused the amateur either to:

(a) sleepwalk and say absurd things in such a keyed-up fashion that she had to be taken to the nearest hospital; or
(b) axe her roommates to death.

It's still a small price to pay for being flu-free, I say. Besides, it's not as if either of us exploded like a hapless seagull.

Posted at 12:39 PM ||

 
I'm sorry you're dead. Now shut up.

If not quite at death's door, I am just an elevator ride away, because a funeral and wake has been taking place in the open ground floor area of my apartment building the past few days. For those of you who've never lived here, this is not as strange as it sounds -- well, actually, it is pretty strange, but just not that unusual. Most public housing blocks in Zingerbore have an open area, fetchingly called a "void deck," where events ranging from Malay weddings to Chinese funerals can be held (for a nominal fee, of course). And right now: no heterosexual unions, just death (insert your own "but how can you tell the difference?!" joke here).

The funeral in general (a Dr. Seuss book title if I ever heard one) is a very sociable event, and this one, especially, is big -- last night I could see that the place was packed, and the number of wreaths and banners has been quite impressive. (Possibly, I am jealous of a dead man.) The family sets up a bunch of cheap folding tables and chairs in the void deck -- so friends can come by, hang out, eat peanuts and drink beer, and pay their respects -- and, ahem, a slightly boxier seat for the guest of honor. Yup, it's lying right there. Wouldn't be a wake without it. Since the void deck is also where the residents' mailboxes are, it's been like this for me: bills, junk mail, so sorry for your loss, postcard, bills, bills, bills. (But at least, unlike this man whose experience I randomly found recorded online, I didn't mistakenly sit down at a wake and started merrily ordering hors d'oeuvres.)

And because these things are so social, there has been noise. These are not solemn affairs; most nights you can hear the chitchat whiffling through the neighborhood. And then we get the funeral procession on the last day, with clanging cymbals, a bad brass band, b-list stars on floats, paid wailing mourners, and a huge Underdog balloon. Wait, wait -- I might have gotten funerals mixed up with the Thanksgiving parade. Anyway, speaking of thanks, everyone concerned left this afternoon, it's all over, so now I can rest in peace.

Posted at 5:51 PM ||

 
And it's housebroken too.

An impressionable young mind gave me the cutest calendar. Puppies! I mean, how cute is that? Puppies! Very, is how cute it is! Puppies! I can hardly stand it! Puppies!

The bitterness quotient of this blog just went way down. Don't adjust your sets.

Posted at 5:14 PM ||

 
Waiter, there's a file in my cake.

Since I started work here almost three years ago, there have been five or six people who have had the job of cleaning my office and emptying my trash (I do take ownership of my litter, you know). The current woman is the most conscientious -- to a fault, even, since she pokes her head in my office at least twice a day and murmurs, "Ruubbesssh?" Ma'am, I love you, but I need my space.

As part of her diligence, Cleaning Lady will line my trashcan with paper. To prevent unseemly leakage, I guess. The funny thing is that she doesn't always use my scrap paper to line my bin, instead engaging in some sort of grand office redistribution scheme whereby one person's unwanted paper can end up doing duty in someone else's can. One time I was able to walk along my hallway and, by looking into the row of wastebaskets outside each of my colleague's doors, fully reconstruct, on a week-by-week basis, what a class I taught in the fall of 2001 looked like.

So now I rip up my papers into shreds, and thus the job of catching my liquid waste falls upon the shoulders of someone else's discarded document. I look forward to seeing what it is each morning, because I am convinced that some colleague or colleagues, the Cleaning Lady, or a combination of both plus the cosmic forces of the universe, are sending me secret messages this way. Today, the paper is one that has a drawing of a thought-bubble kind of cloud, and cheerily written on it was: "If you are going to China, check this out!" There is, however, no "this" to check out. What does it all mean? As someone who recently decided, glumly, that he was staying put for the December holidays, I believe that mysterious beings are taunting me about my wanderlustlessness. The paper will mock me today, all day.

Posted at 1:09 PM ||

 
Love me, love my abs.

A conversation after lunch, between my friend Sprockets and I:

Me: I realized…well, I always knew, but now I think I should commit to the idea that if I want to find a relationship I need to approach it like a project. Hit the bars every night. Color my hair. Join a gym and work out.

Her: I don't think you need to color your hair.

Posted at 3:29 PM ||

 
It’s not news to me.

A few days ago the TV station here held its annual award ceremony. If you thought such ceremonies are masturbatory, well, avert your eyes and stock up on the Kleenex, because here the station gives out awards for which only their own "stable" of "artists" who perform on one and only one Chinese channel are eligible. Excellent! It's like if I won a cheap trophy for being the best worker in my office whose last name begins with "L."

I didn't actually subject myself to watching the broadcast of the atrocity -- I don't have a life, but I do have limits, you know. But thanks to the fact that buses in Zingerbore have TVs on them that fling such shit at you as you try to go about your day, I had to sit through 10 minutes of the award show today (it looks like the show is on an endless loop).

Just these 10 minutes already provided much cause for me to poke my eyes out, and that's not even to go into the fashion sense of the guy who decided that he would come across all "street" by wearing a bandana on his toolish head to a semi-formal affair. They trotted out a distinguished older gentleman who was the first newsreader in the country or something; he gave a long rambling speech in which he had to make a joke about how he once met a gushing fan who thought he was wonderful for being able to memorize everything he had to say on the news. Because she didn't know about the existence of teleprompters, you see! Ha ha ha ha ha ha. I really don't know who is the biggest idiot in this scenario: the supposed fan, the producers for making the newscaster say this stuff, him for agreeing, or me for not taking a cab.

The poor man then had to give out the award for "Best presenter of a newscast or current affairs program." (You will be shocked to hear that a pretty woman won.) That's right: there is no distinction between the news and entertainment programs on this station, in this country. Everybody's in showbiz! Christiane Amanpour probably wishes she were dead, so that she can turn over in her grave.

This is why I get my news from BBCWorld. That, and because the men on the Beeb are cute. What?

Posted at 2:46 PM ||

 
An oddly apt fate for someone who can't pronounce "nuclear."

I'm only just now reading about the practice called google bombing. Supposedly several years old, the little trick is nevertheless being mentioned everywhere nowadays because of what is probably the funniest bomb yet. To see what I mean, go to google, type in "miserable failure" and hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button. Heh. If you're registered at the NYTimes, you can then read about how this happened (apparently it all started here).

At this point, I should insert a joke about some phrase I would most like to be associated with, but I think the ol' "be careful what you wish for" adage applies here.

Posted at 4:10 PM ||

 
This personality trait I can explain.

We all have our little tics when speaking, and mine, as so many of my friends have pointed out, is the repeated use of the word "actually." So of course I had to go watch -- last night, with Ikrek -- the film Love, Actually.

The movie follows eight or nine sets of characters -- fewer if you were watching in Zingerbore: apparently the f*ck**' cen*o*s cut out an entire storyline because it features two people who work as stand-ins on a porn set -- as they search for lurve, at Christmas, no less, which according to the movie is a time for truth-telling (have the people involved never sat around the Christmas tree opening presents?). Enjoyable but not very good, the flick is crammed so full of romantic comedy conventions that I almost have to think that filmmaker Richard Curtis was parodying them, except that he is apparently working on yet another rom-com -- the sequel to Bridget Jones's Diary -- as we speak, so it's not as if he made this as a kind of wad-blowing farewell to the genre.

The film does revel in its own Britishness rather cutely, and one sign of this is in that use of "actually." I know where and why I myself picked up the "actually" habit. Back in the 80s, as I've already mentioned, I used to religiously read the British pop music magazine Smash Hits (still publishing today, except it's now crap). As others have documented (scroll down to "Smash Hits"), this was a brilliant magazine whose focus on teenybopperesque music is belied by its caustic, opinionated writing style. One running joke was the mag's use of "actually," which occurred so frequently that it eventually start to parody its own predilection by spelling the word in emphatic, exaggerated, and drawn-out ways (actually; ackually; actchewally…). Neil Tennant, of the Pet Shop Boys, used to be an editor and may in fact have been especially responsible for this, given that an early album of theirs was called Actually (or, to give the title its full typographical due: Pet Shop Boys, actually.). Well, that clinched it. Hence, my damage.

I suppose we can at least be grateful that I didn't grow up reading Surfer's World, dude.

Posted at 3:07 PM ||

 
My aim is true.

When I was younger, I had many occasions on which to try to advance the national agenda. Zingerbore (tm Arcite) is legendary for being a country that believes that any social aim that needs to be accomplished can be accomplished through public campaigns. Each of these usually consists of a media blitz, complete with slogan, mascot, poster -- and, if we are really lucky, a theme song -- through which the main message of the campaign (Be Courteous! Don't Litter!) is dropped as an anvil over our collective noggin. As dutiful school children, we were usually roped in to design and produce posters on whatever the theme of the campaign du jour was. I'm sure these campaigns were godsends for art teachers -- why strain yourself thinking up an interesting craft activity when you can simply ask your kids to illustrate the national interest?

The campaign that sticks in my mind the most was the "Eat Frozen Fish" campaign. It's not the detail or rationale of the campaign that remains vivid; in fact, looking back, it all seems quite bizarre, if not unreal, but from what I can reconstruct, it was all part of a governmental effort to wean us off of "wet markets" -- those places where food was sold fresh -- and redirect us towards shiny supermarkets. (Presumably the campaign slogan wasn't literal -- I guess you were supposed to know that you shouldn't chomp down on frozen fish, but, you know, first defrost and then maybe sautée them, maybe with a lovely mango glaze.) The campaign sticks in my mind because it was such a nightmare to come up with a good poster for it. You try, using only a 36-color crayon set, drawing a frozen fish that looks appetizing, especially if you didn't know, as I couldn't have been expected to at the tender age of ten, that "salmon" was even a color that’s considered fetching in a fall fashion line.

I continue to be reminded of such inane absurdities everyday because the bathroom at work has a poster that's part of the "Clean Toilets" campaign. (It feels like this one has run forever; I guess some habits die hard.) The poster is drawn as a comic strip -- because there's no more effective advertising tactic than the infantilization of your audience -- and encourages us not to wet the floor. There's another one around I've seen that implores better aim. Amsterdam actually has a very similar effort going on, but oh, it's done so much more wittily and, I would bet, effectively (yes, I tracked down the link by googling "urinal fly"). In a Zingerbore toilet, the only thing I want to piss on is the campaign poster; since this is pinned on the wall and not in the urinal itself, it's probably safe to say that my days as a poster boy are over.

Posted at 5:42 PM ||

 
I'm not proud of it.

Dear Arcite, Limp Bizkit has cancelled its concert here. This is a relief. Without you here in the country, there would have been no one else who knows my deep dark secret to forcibly restrain me from camping outside the band's hotel. I'm not saying this would have happened, but this would have happened. Even without this very good reason for you to be here, I'm still sorry that you are no longer around, but delighted that you sound very happy to be back in Enzone.

Posted at 8:09 PM ||

 
"Soon, you'll be able to buy shares!"



And here I was thinking that trash is usually something that you want to give up ownership of.

Posted at 11:40 AM ||

 
In case you wanted some insight into how my mind works.

I was watching a syndicated rerun of Just Shoot Me (what can I tell ya), and noticed a guest actor that I had seen a million times before -- he has been, for example, on The X-Files as a Military Whateverperson (as he is on almost every role), and just last week I was sort of rewatching LA Confidential, and there he was. (Over at Fametracker, he would be a perfect candidate for their "Hey! It’s That Guy!" feature.) It bothered me that I didn't know the actor's name, but with a little googling I found out that it is "John Mahon." Then at that point I suddenly remembered that I had also seen him on an installment of Frasier -- from, apparently, 1998 -- which revolved around the Cranes reuniting with their Greek relatives. In that episode, John Mahon played the brother of Marty Crane, who is of course played by…John Mahoney. What a brilliant casting joke by the Frasier folks! I only got it five years too late.

Posted at 2:18 AM ||

 
PS: For the love of God, please flush the goddamned toilet.

I found out this evening that my ex-roommate, Mr. Ding-A-Ling, has become a life coach. I'm not even going to explain how heinously hilarious I find this. If I wanted someone to help me formulate aims and fulfill my potential, I would...well, have friends.

Posted at 1:27 AM ||

 
My life, and its soundtrack (II):
"We're the Pet Shop Boys," My Robot Friend/Pet Shop Boys.

Last week saw the release of a greatest hits compilation, PopArt, by Pet Shop Boys, who I love. So even though I have every single track on the collection, in some form or another -- even the mixes on the third CD that are part of the limited edition -- I forked over the cash. It is a Pet Shop Boys objet, after all, and I am a fan.

One sign of my Petheadedness is that I've been reacting to the CDs like Pavlov's bitch: because I know the songs so well in their original contexts, having played each Pet Shop Boys album to death and rigor mortis, it's been hard for me to hear the end of each track without expecting the original next track to follow. So, on PopArt, after "Can you forgive her?" ends, the drums in my head kick into the "bum-bum-bum-bum" that starts off what I expect to the next track, which on Very is "I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing." On the new compilation, of course, it's a whole other deal, and it's jarring for me. I'm perversely attached to the original sequencing, and sort of dread its replacement.

Being a Pet Shop Boys fan -- being a fan of anything, really -- is a funny thing, and it would seem as if Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe would agree, nowadays more than ever. At the end of October, for example, the Boys went on Radio 2 in the UK for a mostly adoring but somewhat rote two-part career retrospective documentary, called "Pet Shop Boys, really." The already infamous documentary concluded with some off-the-cuff comments from Chris and Neil ("We left the mikes running," the presenter says; since it wasn't a live show, the Boys presumably okayed the inclusion of these candid moments), in which they made fun of overly zealous fans. An especially memorable moment saw Neil ripping, with hilarious effect, an online fan's snotty rage ("That 9-min mix of 'This must be the place I waited years to leave' better be on PopArt!") by cackling that not only was there not such a mix, but even if there were, it wouldn't be on a CD compilation targeted at the masses anyway. Neil was of course right on the latter point, but, as fans everywhere were quick to remind him -- often rudely and, indeed, overly zealously -- there is indeed a 9 minute mix of said song. "You ingrate! No, no -- you forgetful ingrate!"

Not that he's been perturbed, but poor Neil. He should have known better to pit his knowledge of, well, himself against the fans. In a related moment just a few days ago, the Boys gave an interview to the London Telegraph in which Chris related this brilliant story: "We had a meet-and-greet after one concert recently, where you get to meet the fans. A conversation developed between me and two fans, and I just got blown out of it because I didn't know anything about the Pet Shop Boys. I wasn't worthy of being part of the conversation. They turned their backs on me." You can indeed always count on your fans to know you better, and that, for an ambivalent Neil and Chris, is probably at some points thrilling, at others sad and pathetic.

Given all this, it is more than a little ironic that the Pet Shop Boys song that I've been enjoying the most is neither of the new tracks that appear on PopArt (neither the current single "Miracles," nor the scathing number about famewhores called "Flamboyant," though both are very good), but rather the b-side to "Miracles." Called "We're the Pet Shop Boys," this track was first written and performed by My Robot Friend, a New York-based electro act. (You can find it on Hot Action!, available at his website.)

Some people have described the original version as a "spoof," but it sounds utterly sincere to me (if this is indeed the case -- if My Robot Friend's sincerity has been mistaken for camp and satire -- than he should be honored to have been received by the press in a way that the Boys have often been). If anything, the song on first listen sounds almost too fan-nish: you know how some people enjoy "wittily" threading together a list of song titles by their favorite artists? Well, "We're the Pet Shop Boys" comes thisclose to that nerdy gesture, namechecking a few Pet Shop Boys titles before closing with a recited litany ("Rent, shopping, being boring…") of nothing but.

The lyric doesn't make absolute sense to me, but one possible way to interpret it is to see the narrator thinking back on a failed relationship ("Suburbia is a slipstream of a memory/Of a time when you were close to me") with a partner who shared his love of the Boys. Pretending that he's "there again," the narrator starts singing "we're the Pet Shop Boys," as if that chant, as well as all the Boys' song titles at the end -- and his and his ex's shared fandom of the group -- can bring them back together again.

The song is suffused with a deep sense of melancholy: a very Pet Shop Boys sense of melancholy (which is one reason why the song, to me, is less a spoof than a heartfelt homage). Part of this comes from a song structure that I think of as very Pet Shop Boys, beginning with a memory of 1984 before coming back to the present, much like the Boys' acknowledged masterpiece, "Being boring." But the melancholy also comes from how the lyric acknowledges that the narrator's vision of the past is fake. In the present the narrator finds that "every boy is just a waste of time," but he "pretend[s] it was different then": it wasn't, but we can think so. But perhaps the song also tries to bring about this sense of unity, even if it was false: if the narrator can just get his ex to sing along with the catchy melody, maybe they can be together again.

The Pet Shop Boys cover -- of a song by a fan, that is -- is sonically better than the original, and Neil's voice has more of the melancholy that makes the song work even better. But it does detract from the potential complexity of the song when Neil sings, "We're the Pet Shop Boys" when, well, they are the Pet Shop Boys (although singing "You’re the Pet Shop Boys" wouldn't really have worked either). For Neil and Chris, the song is probably now more of a statement about the theatricality of pop -- "we are playing at being the Pet Shop Boys" -- something that they've talked about many times before, and less a statement, perhaps, about fandom and its power. Objectively, I probably like My Robot Friend's version, with all its lyrical weirdness, better; as a fan, however, I like the Pet Shop Boys'.

Posted at 12:06 AM ||

 
It's like a surprise, wrapped in an enema.

I'm a few days late in wishing my American readers -- all two of them, but just watch my loyal readership grow -- a happy Thanksgiving, but, if I remember the holiday right, and I think I do, people might still be passed out from the turkey meal and thus in a festive mood.

I'm not really in a land where I can easily celebrate Thanksgiving, which I sort of regret, because the food, it is good (politics schmolitics). A few months ago, I was going to a movie with P.; for some reason that I now cannot reconstruct, we were in a crowded elevator, on our way to a movie theater, when we started having a conversation about my love of stuffed food. I do like them: chicken kiev, chicken cordon bleu, and, um, those funny Japanese peanuts that are enclosed in that crunchy outer shell. P. asked if sushi is on the list. Well, I do like sushi, but the rule -- which I worked out there and then, with a elevator full of moviegoers as my witnesses -- is really that the food must be stuffed with another food item, as opposed to, say, wrapped around other ingredients. (Yes, I do realize that turkey really isn't eaten with the stuffing intact, and the stuff in chicken kiev isn't...oh, let's keep our eye on the story's prize here.) The whole point of stuffed food is that you bite into something, and then, oh, oh, surprise! A whole other food item comes at you.

Having said that, there is such a thing as overkill, and its name is turducken. This, apparently, is a chicken...stuffed into a duck...stuffed into a turkey. If at this point you find yourself humming the nursery song about the cat who swallowed the bird to get at the spider, I don't blame you. (I first heard about this from Velcrometer, who wonders: “Is just one dead bird with bread up its ass not enough vicarious humiliation for you?”) This three-in-one concoction is too much, even for me. Of course, secretly, I wouldn’t mind trying it before I denounce the bizarre excess that it represents; I also wouldn't mind if someone wants to experiment with stuffing a pecan pie inside an almond amaretto pie for dessert.

Posted at 1:47 AM ||