shame

why am i so fond of Jessica Cutler, a/k/a the Washingtonienne? shouldn't i hate her? i'm so confused about this. every time i see her name somewhere, i google the old, superior blog (the one about all the sex she had on capitol hill). and smile.

i have to counteract this with the news that i have picked up Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, reading it in prep for Ulysses.

a double-gawker week—uncork the champagne!

Natasha Lyonne is in trouble again, and so Gawker has linked to the post that quotes from this very blog. see, my roommate at the time, J., had a jailhouse missed connection with NL after he got caught on the street with an open container and had to spend the night in central booking. i wrote about it. Gawker linked. i panicked, fearing legal action, and—far worse—my boss seeing what i wrote on my blog, so i asked them to take down the link. but now it's ok, i left that job, and NL is a confirmed mess; she really did break into someone's apartment and steal a dog or whatever is it indie-darlings-turned-junkie-disasters do for kicks.

i'm on gawker, what does it all mean?

i turn up at very end of this Gawker video (me: hair up; eating cheese; making face and giggling like an anxiety-ridden schoolgirl when i notice the camera) from the Good magazine party last night, at the William Beaver House. i'm sorry, i can't get on board with this beaver name, it's too much. (though there was an incredible projection of beavers building a dam, plus it made for a good Talk of the Town in this week's New Yorker.)

most astute Gawker comment: "looks like a Heeb magazine party." so true. but rest assured, all of you out there who fear the jewish conspiracy, WASPs were also very well represented. and a Heeb party would never serve cheese. or have an open bar where the drinks actually have alcohol in them.

if you were peter pan, you'd be able to fly

today was 35-year-old-men-on-skateboards day in williamsburg. (i saw four, and i was only passing through.)

akin to wearing a neighborhoodie that says, "i'm having a crisis."

"workin' on our night movesss"

i just found out that years ago, one of my friends worked for an escort service in tallahassee called Night Moves Entertainment. the ultimate Bob Seger tribute.

she had a client who wanted her to read a specific book aloud to him. i don't want to sell out her story, so i will leave the matter of which book to your imagination.

kinda embarrassed to have been employed by you (a.k.a. ditto, jen snow)

Jen Snow posted a letter to the Village Voice (that i hope she sent them) on her blog, regarding the fact that Jonas Mekas, Andrew Sarris, Jim Hoberman, and Dennis Lim appeared at BAM on monday in celebration of the new Voice film guide, and the paper didn't even list the event. hmm.

still, the Voice is the best place i've worked, at least in terms of my happiness, hours, and boss relationship, not overall fucked-up-edness—best place, that is, if you don't count the cheese shop where i toiled in high school. but please, feel free to go ahead and count the cheese shop.

adley's blog,

now linked to my blog.
Process Production

table for baldwin

here is the proof that i was in the same room as Alec Baldwin on monday night: the name card swiped from his table. i realize that better proof would be a picture of him, or me and him together, but i couldn't bring myself to ask for that, even when you factor in the open bar.

this brush with Baldwinism came about because a friend of a friendinvited me to come along to a fundraising cocktail party for Tisch. there was a sushi buffet, and William H. Macy (short, shaggy). Tony Kushner and George Wolfe received an award; Tony Kushner is great, very neurotic, entirely brilliant. Marcia Gay Harden came onstage and talked about what it was like to work with them on the first big stage production of Angels in America (off-bway?). what i would give to travel back in time and see that. after the cocktail party thing, we decided to go to bungalow 8 (i know). i'd never been there, and i spent quite a few minutes considering the fact that at any moment Paris Hilton could blow in and strip naked or something. this thought alone was more far more surreal that being near Alec Baldwin.

all in all, an excellent night. i love Alec Baldwin, weird speech pattern—faux-pedigreed, frequent-pause-for-dramatic-effect—and all. the man is magic. long island magic.

terror threat level = orange (high)

Bush twin spotted. Barbara (the cuter one), Daddy's (in semi-dingy williamsburg, not condo williamsburg), saturday night. slumming it at a bar that sells hot dogs. her boyfriend lied to me and my roommate N. and said it wasn't her, but we have it from good sources that the secret service was standing watch outside.

this is almost as good as a Gyllenhaal, but nowhere near the grail that is an Olsen twin. (saw one of those too! M-K, third avenue, last summer, simian yet adorable.)

SFJ//joanna newsom magic

Sasha Frere-Jones has a great review (great as in positive, but also great as in insightful and thoughtful and well written) of Joanna Newsom's new album in the New Yorker. (i think the album is amazing, btw, and i wasn't into her first one.)

this is just an awesome line for a critic, of anything, to write:
"she brought to mind a college student i knew who wore suspenders to show that she would not countenance this debased modern world." extremely effective description.

and funny that JN is related to Gavin Newsom. incidentally, i am into him too.

meth, the ultimate study drug

a columbia grad student was arrested for setting up METH LABS all over manhattan. i love it when nerds go bad.

NY Daily News story (with requisite heinous headline pun): "Meth Lab in 'High' Rise." a little preview—"From the cornfields of the Midwest to the penthouses of New York City, this drug is a poisonous danger."

crushed ice, cilantro, gondoliers—all overrated

potentially raucous/brilliant game, courtesy of The Believer: Overrated. read the rules; print out the gamecards (worked best with adobe acrobat. preview messed it up for some reason).

suggested additional cards: jamba juice, jack nicholson, horseback riding, the george forman grill, westerns, fax machines, roberta flack, the new york times

devolution

at dinner tonight, friends said that if i'm going to read Ulysses, i need to brush up on Hamlet and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. i was going to shortcut all of that. apparently there are no shortcuts. this is not off to the best possible start if i'm already trying to cheat. (i have a bad feeling that two weeks from now all this blog is going to be about is how i'm reading Ulysses, because it's all i'll be doing. wild.)

update: add The Odyssey to the pre-game list. chance this will all get done just diminished by about five percent.

proof positive: calypso IS like so

was out the other night, drunk, when conversation turned to Robert Mitchum (per usual); i flashed back to this album pictured here, Calypso Is Like So. yes. it's true. user review, from one J. in sunny Los Angeles, California: "calypso is so totally like so." (J., it should be noted, originally turned me on to Robert Mitchum's calypso ouevre.) i listened to it today at the library, because that's how i do. and i think the only word to describe the look RM's shooting the camera is "smoldering."

other happenings today: i noted an abundance of totally fucked up hair on the L train, including a guy with cornrows in his goatee. and beads. colored beads. ack. ugh. and i overheard a girl in the same car explaining the oil spill in greenpoint to some guy she didn't seem to know very well. she said they've cleaned it up (not entirely true), it was in the water pipes (not true at all; that means we'd be drinking it), and that somewhere nearby there's an enormous warehouse—200,000 sq ft—full of discarded mattresses (tangent?). maybe she was picking him up. maybe oil spill chitchat is her A game.

then they started talking about different local thai restaurants, the great conversation leveler. in these parts, everyone has something to say about thai restaurants.

file under Hot Disaffected Youth Studies

gay book party (is there any other kind?), wednesday night.

in other news: my good friend K. told me the way i write here doesn't actually sound like me, but not in a bad way. i'm mulling that one over. she is always right about these things.

stop making sense

david byrne has a blog

"lexical-gustatory synaesthete"

=the condition in which your senses comingle and you can taste words. [NYT story]

this to me is as strange as the furry lobster.

pale horse, pale rider

my new copy of Pale Horse, Pale Rider arrived in the mail today. i've been looking forward to this all week. (last week it was my new moccasins. easy come, easy go.) anyway, i've been rabid lately, recommending this book. it is fairly devastating and beautiful—Katherine Anne Porter actually describes what it's like to die of influenza. and how incredible is this title? name a better book title. ok, comparable: The Sound and the Fury, Tender is the Night, The World According to Garp.

this is a good game.

hangover panda merch (!)

aww: hangoverpanda.com.

update:

still at the coffeehouse. we're knee-deep in a Billy Joel album over here. a real one, not the greatest hits. i'm not complaining; i'm just saying. anyway, "just the way you are" is on, and when he sings (croons?), "you always have my...unspoken passion" (he really pounds that last syllable—the -SION), it takes me right back to the Stella short with Sam Rockwell. not the pick of the litter, but worth watching.

the Stella Shorts are another holiday tradition. naturally.

everyone who pretended to like me is gone for the weekend

thanksgiving weekend in greenpoint is excellent because there are never crowds at any of the places i like to go and loiter; you get a break from new york without actually leaving. (i'm loitering at the coffeehouse right now—the loitering here is better than ever since they expanded their menu and got wireless internet. way back when, they only served croissants and muffins, and there was no wireless, and so if you hated baked goods and loved the internet, you were totally fucked.) anyway, almost everyone i know here is from someplace else, except one of my roommates, with whom i've been watching the OC season one on DVD. this seems to be a new holiday season tradition, three years running. naturally.

items:
reread Mark Danner's excellent New York Review essay from two summers ago, "Humanism and Terror (What are you going to do with that?)," pretty much about how difficult it is to confront dread. he quotes the Czeslaw Milosz poem "A Song on the End of the World." the poem is beautiful.

for some reason, the other day i pulled out David Ives's collection of one-acts, All in the Timing. i loved these when i was 15, which says something. it's all very clever-clever winksy lit-snob new yorker "isn't this delightful?" crap. ok, i shouldn't call it crap, it's extremely well executed, but what used to be clever is now sort of grating. like Seinfeld.
the best play in the collection: "the philadelphia," about the metaphysical state of never being able to get what you want, supposedly like the experience of actually being in philadelphia. i think what i really meant to read was John Guare. that's next up.

also think i'm going to read Ulysses over xmas break. so far, i've only read about Ulysses, and been subjected to some insufferable conversations about it. i think it's going to take all five weeks.

and i worked on my Amazon wish list. still in progress.