I’ve yet to discover a guilty pleasure greater than staying up way into the night so absorbed by a novel that I can’t possibly put it down without finishing, greater than reading and weighing and rereading the final sentence, snapping the back cover closed, turning off my bedside lamp, and falling into a deep, contented sleep.
Last night, on a whim, we headed over to the New York Public Library, on the steps of which we had heard Sheryl Crow would be recording part of NBC’s Fourth of July special. Indeed, she was, and after standing in line for a little over an hour, we were packed into the tight space around the recently constructed stage. As it was more of a recording session with live audience than a real concert, it mainly consisted of the same few songs played over and over again; but because of the small size of that audience, we ended up some ten, fifteen feet away from Sheryl herself. My main conclusions:
1. The world needs more live music.
2. Sheryl Crow is teeny but hot, hot, hot.
3. Cyan is definitely going to start producing music videos.
I discovered this afternoon that, bundled with my Time Warner cable modem service, I apparently also receive Time Warner On Demand, a digital tv-based system which allows users to instantly pull up a wide variety of series and films on HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, and a couple of other channels. After watching the three Sex and the City episodes I missed earlier this season (replete with ability to pause for mid-show pee breaks), I’m convinced there may finally be something to give Tivo a run for its money.
Watching the inimitable Singing in the Rain this evening, it occurred to me the world would be a much better place if more people spontaneously sprung into elaborately choreographed song and dance numbers.
Best. Song. Ever.
Earlier today, in an effort to cut down the time I spend cycling through various weblogs daily, I created an account at blo.gs, a site that allows users to track when all of their favorite blogs were last updated from a single page. In the process, I was a bit dismayed to discover that just one of my long list of favorites belonged to a straight guy, and I spent some time thinking about why that might be the case.
I realized that most of the web’s best blogs fell into one of three categories: political news, technical news, or personal revelation. The first two types, maintained mainly by dorky journalists and journalistic dorks, respectively, bore me to tears. The third type, largely maintained by writers and designers, were what populated my blo.gs list. HBO to the other types’ CNN and TechTV, those personal blogs never failed to draw me in.
The gender gap, I realized, stemmed from the vast majority of straight guy blogs falling into the first two categories, from the vast majority of straight guy bloggers being either policy wonks or tech dorks. Groups, I realized, that were not just too straight-laced to dish details, but actually lived lives so painfully dull that they simply and entirely lacked details to dish. I didn’t dislike guy’s blogs – I disliked lame people’s blogs, and guys just happened to rather frequently be lame. (So that’s what women are always bitching about!)
Still, I wondered, what happened to interesting straight guys? Weren’t there any straight guy writers and artists? Weren’t there at least some guys who went on dates – with girls – and were willing to spill the details? Actually, didn’t I go on dates with girls? Wasn’t I an attention whore with a blurred sense of the public/private barrier? Perhaps, I realized, it all fell to me. Perhaps it was my job, my calling, to do something stupid and ballsy, something providing ample opportunity to look like a complete and total jackass, something that could prove, once and for all, that straight guys could maintain intriguing, captivating personal blogs.
No sooner had I sat down to puzzle that question, to weigh the enormity of such a task, when the answer popped up in my email box. “Friendster: M is now your friend!” the answer said. Friendster! Brilliant! In that site lay all the intrigue I needed to hold up the torch for heterosexual male bloggers everywhere. My mind was made up. The exploits had begun.
One updside of roommates? Discovering music I wouldn’t otherwise stumble across. Case in point: the truly, remarkably excellent The Creek Drank the Cradle by Iron & Wine.
Throughout my entire life, I have been fascinated with words. By the age of two, my relatives recount, I rejoiced in discovering new ones, such that for days after I would use the word wherever possible, mustering situations in which the new confection might be put to work. As an avid reader, I’ve collected a cornucopia of words in the years since my early toddling start, such that, by now, I rarely discover new ones. Or, at least, rarely discover valuable new ones – words that bear utility while possessing a certain poesy when heard and a tangy mouth-feel when spoken.
Which is why I’ve so far particularly enjoyed Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. The first 266 pages, besides being an immensely immersive narrative, have been chock full of excellent new words, and old ones I’d somehow forgotten along the way. Consider the new additions of ‘grampus’, ‘lepidopterist’ and ‘bole’, and the rediscovery of ‘obdurate’, ‘ullage’, ‘trope’ and ‘parbuckle’, all gleaned from a short eight page chapter! Not all of Chabon’s words are to be trusted, however – no definition I’ve found for ‘pappilate’, for example, supports Chabon’s lyrically erroneous use in his description of a Luna Moth: “it rested, pappilating its wings with a certain languor like a lady fanning herself, iridescent green with a yellowish undershimmer, as big as that languid lady’s silk clutch.” Though, perhaps, I should rejoice in, rather than criticize, his reworking of meaning. After all, only by such calculated rule-breaking has language evolved, producing the dizzying abundance of words, sweet words, that we enjoy today.
Just received this email:
Dear Joshua:
We are creating a TV pilot about blogging. We want to bring this phenomenon of personal expression to television for the very first time, and have been scouring the web for appropriate sites. Your web site seems like a potentially great fit for the show.
If you would like to be a part of our pilot, you can do so by submitting a video that encapsulates you and your blog. Whatever you want to say and show in your video is fine. The key is to capture the essence of your blog in video format (etc., etc.)
While I was sincerely flattered, I don’t suspect I’ll end up doing it. For some reason, I just don’t imagine this overtaking, say, Joe Millionaire, in terms of viewer potential. But perhaps that’s just my own, cynical, newly Hollywood-ified viewpoint. Perhaps blogTV will, in fact, sweep the nation, finally merging micropublishing and mass media to hysterical audience response, forever changing the very nature of television, the web, nay, written and visual artistic expression itself! Or, on the other hand, maybe not.
Several weeks back, to accommodate the ridiculous percentage of my time spent away from home, I swapped a significantly larger hard drive into my laptop, and completed the transfer of my entire CD collection to disc. Now, with nearly 400 CDs as 28 gigs of MP3s paired with a ridiculously high fidelity set of earphones, I have nearly three weeks worth of continuous musical bliss wherever I travel.