Jersey Bounce Saturday, September 20, 2003

A Jonathan Schwartz afternoon. Clearing the closet. Friends later, possibly new music. Not much to post, but I've got a quota here.

@ 12:54:00 PM, ,

Here Comes the Rain Again Friday, September 19, 2003

Ten fifty-three. The flood waters didn't rise, work went well, I'm going to see friends tomorrow, and I even straightened up some, so I don't have to get up as early as I figured. Still: Ten fifty-three, and here comes the panic. Conflicted feelings over Secret Things, I think, or maybe just that Dr Pepper I had earlier. I shouldn't have caffeine after sundown...

Listening to the new Mark Eitzel record, which I swore up and down I wouldn't buy. Eitzel was the frontman of a mopey, artsy rock band called American Music Club, and his solo stuff is in the same band: Woe is me, and here's why. The novelty here: He recorded the record with a bunch of Greek musicians, so instead of synthesizers and slide guitars you get guys playing gourds and bailiffs and whatever the hell those things are called. It's interesting, but at the bottom of it, it's still a guy with no real problems moaning about the thorn in his paw. So I can't recommend it. All the Eitzel fans out there will be crushed, I realize.

The new David Bowie is another story. I haven't really digested it yet, but on the first couple listens it sounds great. His last couple of records have been very sleepy--no real melodies, very lazy rhythms and no real variation from song to song (drone drone drone). This one has lots of meaty beaty tunes, lots of absolutely filthy guitar work...a fun listen.

What happens to James Caan after the credits of "Rollerball"? That's the real question...

@ 11:26:00 PM, ,

This Is the Story of the Hurricane

A breeze of a day. Story cleared early without a fuss. Nice chats with the other inmates. Even the Au Bon Pain lunch tasted good. So swellegant, in fact, that it confounds blogging. But a clean edit cometh before a fall, so stay tuned.

@ 4:09:00 PM, ,

To Create Sex Antagonism Is an Unwise Precedent

Fought my way across four avenues of lashing gale. Power lines down, live wires crackling on the tracks like cobras. The ferry dashed to pieces. Survived clinging to a splintered plank. Then I saw no more. Isabel! Your fury unquenchable!

It's amazing what a good talk will do for you. I got in extra extra early to finish up a story that I thought would be a problem. Instead I spent an hour and a half chatting with another editor who'd had the same idea. Not about anything earth-shaking, just this and that. People ain't bad, although I will deny that under oath.

Today's headline from "The Good Days" by Walter Lord, the banner from a suffragette rally in the 1910s. You go, girls!

@ 10:28:00 AM, ,

Tuesday Is Soylent Green Day Thursday, September 18, 2003

Ding ding ding! I thought we would sit out the storm with "Soylent Green," but apparently we scared the goddamn thing off. Even if the weather flaked, the movie did not. Observations this time around: Edward G. Robinson's performance isn't as fabbo as I remembered; Charlton Heston's is vastly better. He pulls off being sleazy and naive and genuinely caring without ever seeming forced or sentimental.

That said, there's not much to the movie. It's mostly atmosphere, and the policier stuff does not convince. What I never noticed before was the religious undercurrent. There's the stuff in the church, obviously, but then there are the meals, which come so dear that they seem sacramental; Edward G.'s goodbye to Charlton, which wouldn't have been out of place at the foot of the cross ("I love you Thorn." "I love you, Sol." Tell them the truth.); then the movie's Big Secret, which has more than a slight biblical echo. As Dr. Percy said, "Tenderness leads to the gas chamber."

The new David Bowie album is something special. Buy it!

@ 10:19:00 PM, ,

Feels Like It's Raining All Over the World

Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky...

Oh, for an iPod now that the hurricane is here. I'd love to hear Frankie belting out that tune. It's been a decent day, which makes for a crummy blog. So I'll sign off for now.

@ 4:58:00 PM, ,

Trains and Boats and Planes

A damned good morning, after a great evening. I was about to run out the door yesterday when I remembered I owed someone an e-mail. I could've skipped it, but I decided to go back so I wouldn't feel guilty and twitchy the whole way home. I stood next to the computer, urging it to restart, watching the sun get lower and lower over the Hudson...then banged out something that may have been English and ran for the ferry. No boat--I'd just missed one. Damn and blast. When I got off the boat, I made sure to make up for lost time and ran like hell for the light rail--this time I made it, an express just sitting there.

I figured I'd evened everything out, so I read while I walked home. Missed all the lights, it took three times longer than usual--no sweat. When I got to my corner, there was my reward: Mrs. WTJ, just stepping off a bus! Kismet!

Where was I--damned good morning. Everybody in goofy high spirits, everybody ready to bond and complain. Dr. Percy, of course, would say it's because the storm is coming: Everybody's happy in a hurricane. We'll see.

@ 12:53:00 PM, ,

I'm a Stat Freak Wednesday, September 17, 2003

Unwound with "Rollerball." It didn't disappoint. I remembered it being a lot goofier than it actually is--silly dresses, sparkly eyeshadow, extraordinarily tight pants. There's some of that, but on the whole everybody seems to be taking the story seriously. There are a lot of wonderful moments where Norman Jewison just cuts to reaction shots and they're all mainstream. I don't know how else to put it. The actors use those close-ups to get across all of the nuance of character you'd expect in, say, "Breaking Away."

Some interesting philosophical points, corporations and comfort vs. freedom and risk. The corporate-critique thing is fair enough, as far as it goes, homogenization, dumbing down, rat-boys in charge, etc. But a more important point, I think, is James Caan's asking how this all happened. Where'd these companies come from? How'd they take over? Nobody can answer that, not even Zero, the fishtank computer that knows everything. The answer is that at some point the world's nations went bankrupt and the multinationals took over; people traded their old rights for new luxuries.

Again, fair enough. But why did people decide luxury was more important than freedom? The movie answers that in bits and pieces: the godawful corporate anthems--godawful because they signify nothing--the casual disregard for life, the cheapening of love. The corporations didn't cause all that; all that is what caused the corporations. If you stop believing in the big intangibles, you'll believe anything.

Designated rest period commences.

@ 10:59:00 PM, ,

Prince Spaghetti Day

An age-old mystery solved! A friend at the office passed this along to me moments ago. I read on, baffled, until I came to the following paragraph (the story's about a big weird playwright):

Yet Innaurato-as-playwright has always seemed to be anticipating his own (Catholic, operatic) martyrdom. Just look at the titles of his plays: Passione (Italian family reunites, compares attempted suicides, with fat daughters-in-law and lots of food), Benno Blimpie (500-pound youth eats himself to death), the low-cal Ulysses in Traction (drama students are trapped in the theater during a race riot). Gemini, his sole hit, was his most baldly commercial effort -- zero mutilation, self or otherwise. Anyone who watched New York late-night TV can remember the Gemini ad's two indelible lines: "Take human bites!" and "No thank you, Fran, I'll just pick." Plus a 16-year-old fat kid riding around and around on a trike (that's Herschel). It was as ubiquitous (and loud) as Crazy Eddie.

Ding ding! I had been talking to him about my near-death experience at my own wedding. Mrs. WTJ, with a face that launched a thousand ships, was putting a piece of cake in my mouth, to the astonishment of all present, when a certain friend shouted out, "TAKE HUMAN BITES!"

I laughed and gagged, and literally spent two years trying to remember where the hell that line came from. Not even the certain friend remembered. Now everything is wonderful. Ronzoni sonno bonni!

@ 9:29:00 AM, ,

Wish You Were Here

Another morning in Ape City. The summer's gone but I can't admit it; those hard nipples every morning are just the thrill of being alive. Apparently there's a "real rain" coming this week, so I'd better make some Xs with duct tape.

Mrs. WTJ sent me off with a sleepy go-get-em-slugger. I was holding a bagful of catshit, in more ways than one, so I came across less than receptive. But I will go get em, just for Mrs. WTJ. Even at seven-forty in the morning, that face could make me take on the entire population of Troy.

My reward for catshit and hard nipples was a couple of interesting ideas, not for the project at hand but for the next one, natch, and Laser Floyd: Coming up the escalator I glanced over at the marble stairway and saw a perfect rainbow on the polished rock, broken up by the slats of the stairway opposite. The lunatic is in my head!

@ 8:25:00 AM, ,

The Theological Implications Are Staggering! Tuesday, September 16, 2003

Had another "we'll laugh about this in thirty years" day. Most of the agita was avoidable, but avoiding it would require the usual Powers and Principalities to admit that the way they do things doesn't work. So a thirty-years day. If I'm still blogging in '33 I promise to post a smiley face on Sept. 16.

Dr. Percy helped:

We talked about failure. What is failure? Failure is what people do ninety-nine percent of the time. Even in the movies: ninety-nine outtakes for one print. But in the movies they don't show the failures. What you see are the takes that work. So it looks as if every action, even going crazy, is carried off in a proper, rounded-off way. TV has screwed up millions of people with its little rounded-off stories. Because that is not the way life is. Life is fits and starts, mostly fits. Life doesn't have to stop with failure. Not only do you not have to jump in the creek, you can even take pleasure in the general fecklessness of life, as I do, a doctor without patients sailing paper P-51s at a martin house. I am a failed but not unhappy doctor.

And then:

I discovered that it is not sex that terrifies people. It is not knowing who they are or what to do with themselves. They are frightened out of their wits that they are not doing what, according to experts, books, films, TV, they are supposed to be doing. They, the experts, know, don't they?

I, on the other hand, have nothing coherent to say. So I'll keep typing.

To answer an e-mail: The Pole I mentioned earlier, in conjunction with Secret Thing #2, is not connected to any Pole of my acquaintance, even intimate acquaintance. Ahem.

To answer another e-mail: The free MP3 page at Revenant Records, founded by the late great John Fahey, is wunnerful, many many thanks. Now I gotta figure a way to shoehorn Americana into my Sinatra/show tunes spree. Not to mention that next week will be absolutely killer for new music: something by Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Rufus Wainwright--and Joe Henry! I suspect the latter will not be wunnerful, judging by the new song he played in concert last year. But I hope against hope.

Anyhow, Mrs. WTJ is home and we both need company. Ciao.

@ 9:20:00 PM, ,

We Want to Take a Sample of Your Brain

Did I meet Rick Moranis Friday evening? On the Mezzanine (ahem) at Roseland, just as Mrs. WTJ and I were moving away from the speaker to avert my impending deafness, a tiny guy in a baseball cap shook his head. "You should stay put, you know," he said. "I've been all over the place, moving around the whole perimeter, and this is the only place where the separation isn't muddy." I told him I was about to go deaf but I didn't catch what he said back.

Only as I walked away did I realize who he sounded like: the accountant in "Ghostbusters." And I have since confirmed that Rick Moranis is friends with one Donald Fagen.

Was that you, you glorious hoser?

@ 9:39:00 AM, ,

The Light Rail Is Standing Like Statues

Apologies for a dreary post. Six in the morning is the wrong time for a state-of-the-world message. Besides, there's a hurricane coming, which would cheer anybody up.

Nothing to report as such, except a wunnerful idea for Secret Thing #2, which occurred to me on the train this morning. A hint: It involves Poles!

@ 8:01:00 AM, ,

The Last Broadcast

The day is hardly here and already it's shaping up to be a tremendous pain in the ass. Without details, I can already guarantee I'm going to spend the day refereeing and negotiating and by the end of it I will not have done a single damned thing that gets me where I want to be.

I realize that's what work is. But does it have to be? Or a better question: What would I rather be doing?

This is turning into an EST session, so I'm going to submit to Torquemada on the treadmill. Ciao for now.

@ 6:02:00 AM, ,

A Late Fix Monday, September 15, 2003

I got them weary blues. A long day of refereeing "suggestions," then commiserating with the reporter when they ended up being dictates.

It occurs to me that when I get elliptical like that, the blog resembles Robert Fripp's diary, my first exposure to online journals. He had a little aphorism up today to the effect that you can get the measure of somebody by observing how he deals with money, sex and time. Three of my deadly sins. All he missed was food.

Anyway, I can go now, so I'm gonna.

@ 6:36:00 PM, ,

Letters Written That Don't Get Sent

YAWN. The first morning of my new regime, waking up at 5 a.m. to work and work out, butted up against the final night of my old regime, staying up until 11:30 doing, essentially, nothing. Well, not nothing, exactly: I had a productive IM chat with a fellow conspirator and nibbled at the corner of a bunch of ideas that would all be swell to work on if I didn't already have ten million other things to do. "Fix a fence, fender dents," as Lowell George sang...

Not much brewing. I put aside Dr. Percy for a day (much to all of your relief, I'm sure) to start up a nifty but thin history of the early 20th century. More later.

@ 9:29:00 AM, ,

The Kisses Are Hers and Hers and His Sunday, September 14, 2003

Frank Sinatra belting out "Stormy Weather." What a deep, thick, rolling voice--he sounds like he invented thunder.

Anyway, I promised to talk about "Three's Company" and sex. This is probably the first time I've written about sex as such, apart from an appalling section of "Black Sails Over Freeport," which reads like a Lifetime movie from an alternate universe ("Not Without My Undead Daughter!"). So forgive any stumbles. This happens to every guy the first time, right?

Let me start, as usual, by dragging in Dr. Percy, this time from "Love in the Ruins":

No one ever expects the English to be rascals (compare Greeks, Turks, Lebanese, Chinese). No, the English, who have no use for God, are the most decent people on the Earth. Why? Because they got rid of God. They got rid of God two hundred years ago and became extraordinarily decent to prove they didn't need him. Compare Merrie England of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A nation of rowdies.

To unpack that a bit, Percy, like G.K. Chesterton, believed in orthodoxy. The constraints and rules of tradition made true freedom possible--because those limits defined the world for the believer. Without those definitions, the logic goes, people do as they please and then become a slave to their appetites. Which is not freedom at all.

So, in the quote above, the God-fearing Englishmen were free to play. Right and wrong were clearly defined, but there were lots of laughs to be had skirting the sulphur. Without God, there is no guiding star to reach for, no sulphur to avoid; so they putter along on tepid politeness. Chaucer's sinners are lustier than any Profumo, because they know they're taking on heaven; but Chaucer's bridegrooms are lustier still, because they have the mandate of God to make love. Trust me on this--I have a degree in English.

Which brings me to "Three's Company." The culture that produced it had its head so far up its ass it could peek out of its own mouth. But it still insisted on some admittedly arbitrary rules for popular entertainment--let's call those rules, for now, the Mandate of Heaven. "Three's Company" was a jiggle show powered by lousy gay jokes and plot devices so creaky they would've gotten cut out of "School for Scandal" during rehearsals. But it wasn't dirty. The show's creators understood they were operating under the Mandate of Heaven and used those limits as a spur to creativity.

To see just how creative it was, compare it with "Man About the House," the British sitcom that inspired it. There, the characters are gritty and gap-toothed and awful to each other, like they just wandered over from the "Trainspotting" lot. On "Three's Company," the men are trying to bed everyone in sight, the girls are fighting off everyone in sight, but it's all in good humor--like a wife out of Chaucer, they know where heaven and hell are located, and they like skirting the sulphur for yuks. The pallid wastrels on "Man About the House" have never heard of either place, and just shuffle along under the stars.

(By the way, I realize that the real-world version of that Regal Beagle joie de vrie had serious consequences. I'm just talking about TV here.)

As part of its creativity, "Three's Company" was discreet about sex. Yes, there was jiggle; yes, there were unsubtle jokes about Greedy Gretchen. But there was a lightness about it, not casualness--as there is on "Seinfeld" or "Friends" or "Sex and the City." By eliding the seamy stuff, by redefining sex as bikinis and jokes about canteloupes, the show was somehow more adult and knowing than "Seinfeld." In other words, the show knew that it was being unrealistic; and it knew the audience would know that too. So it was free to play. As opposed to shows today, which go into clinical detail about jacking off and the taste of jizz, but somehow miss the point of sex: the fun, the playfulness, the mystery, the sly risque stuff. If you can sit in a coffee shop and talk about giving head, the mystery's gone and embalmed.

Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't trade one episode of "Seinfeld" for all of "Three's Company" and "Laverne and Shirley." And that's the kick in the head. I'd rather have the stuff that's funny and clinical, but reflects a world without a compass, than a lusty merrie show that puts every impulse in its proper place but sucks like a collapsar. The same way, as Percy observed, Kafka's buddies would listen to him reading his godawfully depressing stories and laugh out loud--because they recognized the world he was describing and the familiarity of it cracked them up. The same way "Touched by an Angel," and the other gnostic fantasies of the Tiffany network, appall certain cranky religious aesthetes. That ain't life, baby!

One of Percy's big questions was, Why do we feel so good when things are bad and feel so bad when things are good? Because we don't believe that things make sense anymore, because for all the frank clinical talk about neuroses and blowjobs the modern world can't tell us a single damned thing about how to live and be happy or even just human. So thanks and goodbye, Mr. Ritter; you put things in their place for half an hour a week.

Tune in next time, when I use Thomas Aquinas to deconstruct the Rachel Ray pictorial in this month's FHM.

@ 8:37:00 PM, ,

Heaven on an Empty Meter

The Deists thought God was a blind watchmaker. Judging by the volume of the churchbells across the street, He is also deaf. Aren't you supposed to rest on the seventh day?

I see vast trouble ahead, in the form of the late, but lovely, Nancy LaMott. Her CD of Johnny Mercer songs, newly back in print with the rest of her catalog, arrived the other day, and I'm listening for the first time. My critical soul-mate Terry Teachout calls her the best cabaret singer he ever heard; Jonathan Schwartz closes every broadcast with one of her songs. I concur. What a wonderfully clear voice; completely "cabaret" but without the affectations and dramatics. More purchases in store.

On a related note, I think I'm giving up the iPod for a little bit. Or at least using it more sparingly. Hearing a couple of burnouts at the Steely Dan show talk about, well, hearing, convinced me to approach headphones warily. We are, after all, the first generation to have Walkmen et al for our whole listening lives; nobody knows what's going to happen to us forty or fifty years down the road.

If anybody thinks they ain't dangerous, and can refute my fears, I'd love to know. Seriously.

@ 7:30:00 AM, ,