Start start

First day at new job. Apron-strings mobile device issued, health-coverage and sexual-harassment details glanced at, &c. No real work was handed out, so I went home at six and watched a Steven Seagal movie with roommate and Reilly. (This was unfinished business: BMH and I saw the first half of it during a taxi ride to Stapleton Int'l on a glorious afternoon back in May.) Also, new favorite thing: delenda est, which reminds me of the Slits' "Instant Hit."

App. Tr.

Last day before new job starts. Sharif, Elanor, and I took an early Metro North train to Hurd Corners, NY and hiked a short stretch of Appalachian Trail. It took us through a pasture that was full of cows on the way back. It was easily 65 degrees F out. Well spent.

Mystère Dan

Dan materialized in early June in time to play the first Scrams show. Not materialized. Answered an ad that said you don't even need equipment because we've just scored a Farfisa that you can play. But materialized, because of the darkly mysterious past (see, e.g., the Thai jail stint we heard about later) and because it turned out he was only 100 yards away in his own, smaller rehearsal space playing drums all night. And drinking red wine. And laying other instruments and vocals over drum tracks to make tinny, obscenely good one-man rock'n'roll recordings. New Dan songs showed up in my e-mail this week and reminded me that I'd vowed to make this blojj a springboard for his leap to the big time. Not really. But really give a listen.



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Each one nonplus one

I've noticed an odd tone in Brooklyn Heights parent-small-child exchanges. As dusk fell on Montague Street Saturday, I overheard a costumed little girl tell her father that her Halloween glowstick held magic slime that gave you powers if you touched it directly. Dad deadpanned back that he agreed about the magic slime, but thought that contact with it would turn girls into boys and boys into girls. If you wanted to give her something to work out in therapy down the road, or just scare the 10/31 crap out of her, good job. And yesterday, a mom in full Socratic mode was goading her daughter to imagine a thirty-hour energy drink or even a sixty-hour one. The likely horrors of a three-day taurine high have to be well beyond a second grader's grasp. Never miss an opportunity to blow their little minds, I guess.

Beast of myth

From a Foreign Affairs piece on Somalia's permanent intractability: "[T]here is no clear horse on which the U.S. government can bet." Cheap shot (blojjing is free if you ignore opportunity costs):

Dusk flight

I threw the spacey N. Mex. motto into an e-mail to a friend there and hit accidentally on "land of enchaînement." Meaning a theory that everything in the year there led ineluctably to everything else: relationship falls apart with astounding speed, job runs on fear, town has void feel; but bleakness makes sad fellow transplants into friends, prompts return to DIY shows and bands, and ultimately throws nice light on mid-30s blank personal slate. Of course it's easy to fit a line to points now and from this vantage. Hegel's insight on the exercise had to do with Minerva's owl.

Also, Lucy Kellaway's FT column today uses what is for me a novel phrase: miles prefer, where miles does an adverb's work without explicit help from by. Could this work with any increment that figuratively measures preferences for or relationships between things? Say, streets, as in streets ahead, as in vastly superior. Or million years. The intelligibility frontier would get crossed fast, I imagine.

Notional beats

Went with fellow N. Mex. escapee BMH and his lady friend to see black metal groups at a show space far up Myrtle Ave. Saw and chatted with Mick Barr for the first time since probably 2003. Got renihilated by Liturgy, whose record sounds genre-typically brittle but who were legitimately propulsive and dynamic live.

This night, anything

Helped Thomsar move a couch. Paid in mid-aft. drinks at Mario's, a stark Hoboken sadness bar that no light or woman has entered since probably 1948. Then plodded back to the PATH station, mixing with the tide of insipid sexy-Ghostbuster and man-purse-from-The-Hangover costumes headed for the city. Party weekend.

Phil. a

At Alfred's in Philadelphia. Met at Amtrak station, stopped off for felafel sandwiches and 5B-gauge drum sticks, and hit pay-by-hour rehearsal space on the city's north side to work out Misfits covers for group we're theoretically (now a bit more practically) in with Touareg and Thomspan. Bad Religion was practicing there for no reason. I heard them start into "Generator," which I somehow recognized, when I walked back to borrow a screwdriver from the space's teenage manager.

You should hear what

Today I changed trains at 6th Ave. / 14th Street, which means walking city blocks underground. In the single longest stretch of tunnel, I recognized the tail end of the Shirelles' "Baby It's You" being played by a tall Af.-Am. guy with an outdoor guitar. He absolutely nailed the "Don't leave me alone / Come on home" line just as I went by. I need to get into field recording. Because I haven't, here's the curiously dubby 1962 original, ripped from vinyl.

Fecsh

Locals' haunts tour of Central Park West with MMW, who was in town too briefly. We lunched at a place on Amsterdam Ave. whose eponym boasts he's the sturgeon king. I had a non-fish sandwich. I remembered, and somehow relayed to MMW, that Kevin O'Meara and I had once hatched a plan for a startup called Indoor Essence of Sturgeon Pressure Wash. On a long night drive, in the late innings of a worst-possible-idea game. The business would acquire some live sturgeon (whatever the collective noun is), put them in tanks, and then do nothing. At length the sturgeon would expire and putrefy horribly in the tanks. The fetid water would then go into a fleet of pressure washers. Like you use to blast grime off sidewalks or the exterior of a building you're about to paint. Technicians would then (for a fee) come to your home and turn the foul jets on its interior walls, furniture, carpets, drapes, etc. Rank sturgeon essence would be blown forcibly into every fiber of every surface and thing. You would have to move out and take nothing with you. And curse the day that the men in blue coveralls turned up your driveway, uncoiled their hoses, and got to work. The company's name would burn on your tongue. But why, when the website and later the sales rep set out the process in such detail, did you go ahead with it?

This is the sort of incoherent thing Kevin and I used to work out on long night drives. Now I take trains (mostly the 2-3) around my new-old adoptive home. And now MMW and I meet for lunch and talk about where and through what this decade of our lives will go. Maybe that mental exercise doesn't make much more sense than the worst-possible-ideas one. It does remind you who's in your corner, though.

State of apt.

One full week in Brooklyn. No couch yet. Roommate (sibling, with whom I last lived in 1996) pitches a velodrome instead. And demonstrates.

Not connect

Back in NYC. Only patchy Internet until the weekend, when I get my laptop back and service is set up in the new apartment. Thomspan's wedding was the thing of the year. Pictures to follow. And stories, as we piece them together. For example, I learned afterward that I'd picked up the mic, calmly informed the guests that the AC/DC number starting up was about American thighs, and invited those who'd held back so far to make their way to the dance floor. And so on.

Holiday in

Last afternoon in Buenos Aires (yesterday, before the night flight back to Miami): short commuter-rail trip to suburban Nuñez and what's now the Memory Museum, which from roughly 1976 to roughly 1983 was a place where torture roughly happened. The museum itself, I learned, is appointment-only, but parts of the quiet, leafy grounds are open for unguided strolls. Placards explain which sites were used for what awful things by which "task group." The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human-rights group, now runs a free-format cultural center in one cluster of buildings; when I ambled through, an all-girl punk group was rehearsing in a gym. It hit me that I should add this visit to a personal list that also includes Auschwitz and Pol Pot's killing fields. How did this happen? And if I'm serious about checking off the last century's least humane notable places, what's left? A patch of Stalinist gulag, Srebenica, Hiroshima, a reeducation center in the Chinese countryside somewhere, and maybe one of Idi Amin's or Mobutu's dungeons, I guess. Ugh.

Ten

Argentina reaches South Africa 2010 with a clumsy, mostly dull 1-0 win over Uruguay. Maradona's press conference yields this memorable line: "Que me la sigan chupando." In two defiant syllables, suck it. In four less literal ones, fuck the haters—the ones who doubted that El Dieguito's uninspired squad could get it together to qualify. (To these he also directed a dramatically mafioso line about not forgetting things.) Could a head coach in any U.S. sport be so coarse on record, whether or not he set out beforehand that he meant no offense to any ladies present (a formality that Maradona managed to observe)?