Weekend

Weekend image runners-up

Amirite?

It must be different to live in a world where it's already been announced that Spencer Pratt will have a role in the new Bret Easton Ellis movie The Canyons.

I can't EVEN imagine it!

And medicines - have they advanced?

Have the pharmaceutical wizards, far away in the sterile*glass worlds of their laboratories, made a miraculous nostrum that will make the [six page!] Fiona Apple profile in the summer issue of New York make any sense at all?

Let us hope so.  Let us hope so.


* pronounced steh-RILE

Is there blood in the streets?

Does senseless violence pervade?  I can't imagine it does not, given what's likely happened in the interval since I'm writing this.

I really did think it would be Natalie.

Your next door neighbor?

When I'm writing, the place where my family lives is between a vacant house (maybe they've torn it down by then!) and a nice guy who runs a barbeque restaurant.

I bet your neighbor looks like this!:

"Do you have a bucket I can borrow for an hour?  I want to get the car washed
before the city says we can't with the drought..."

 Ha ha!

I'm not sure how to tell you to reach me, exactly

I mean, as I type, I'm in the past.  Have we established this?  You live in a world I can hardly imagine.

How to find me, then?

At a pinch, I would check for a teepee in Spain, on a beach, where I live with my wife and son and Kelley and Cheryl and maybe Kyle, if he wants to come.  I live on olives and garlic and fresh anchovies and exotic spicy jamon made from acorn-fed pigs.

When you get there, don't be shocked if I'm not in, as I will be driving the burros up the hill for the night.

Styles will have changed, I imagine

D_____ is such a cradle of innovation, the wellspring of countless inventions that touch our lives in multiple ways, every single day.

At the time I'm writing this (in your past! imagine!), there is still crime, though.  Not everyone has everything they need or sometimes they are prey to addictions that can cause them to do goofy shi.  I know this sounds silly to you in the future, when you have platinum flowing on tap!

In these benighted times, they still single out these unfortunates as they are apprehended and place their images on a sort of electric "web" for anyone to see.   Barbaric, right?  And worse, even your correspondent has been known to further distribute these images to intimates for something they used to call "lulz."

For instance, as I look -- HOLY CATS!  This guy must have escaped from the FUTURE and come back a la Bruce Willis in Twelve Monkeys!  How else to we account for his amazing hairstyle but to be confident that D_____ will remain the bellwether of technological advancement and personal style that is now, back here on June 27th, 2012 AD?:

Have the cats taken over?

A'leau there! 

Here in the past, I was driving last night and we had to come to a stop as three cats in the neighborhood ambled across the thoroughfare.  One just stood in front of the car and stared at me until I was close to honking! This was last night to me, but three nights ago to you!  Amazing!

Anyway, it's another season in the neighborhood way too many cats going unclaimed/unfixed.  So I'm traversing time itself to see if they have taken over completely! 

Is Wes Anderson still around?

Two days from now, is there still Wes Anderson?  Moonrise Kingdom opens wide (as they say) today.

Two days ago, when I'm writing, that seems impossibly far away!  I should probably watch Fantastic Mr Fox or something to get limbered up.  But I fear we likely fall into the clever trap set by Netflix that makes us watch the same episodes of The Hills again and again. Maybe Teen Vogue intern Emily will show up...

Plus we will have to find a sitter.  Is it you?  Are you watching our son in the future?

It feels strange talking to you from the far-distant past!  Ha! Ha!

Hello, people of the future!

I'm writing this on Wednesday, June 27th, 2012.  I am from the past and you are in the future.  Congratulations!  You made it, apparently, fending of the roving packs of illiterate foragers who pillage the various fiefdoms and corporate city-states that the country has become since I wrote this.

Anyway, I hope all is well and you are safe!

The Ickey Woods Story

Duke's getting hitched and it occurred to me last night that perhaps he had not told his intended about the time he was playing an acoustic set in Middletown and Ickey Woods lobbed ice cubes at him from in front of the stage.

I texted, he had not.

I asked the Bride if she knew the story and she did not.  I told her the whole thing, in more detail than I am going into here.  At the end she sat stone-facedly and claimed she would "never smile again."

A favor:

I'm STILL listening to Kiss me Kiss Me Kiss Me today, maybe that new Saint Etienne again later, but I need you to pretend or maybe imagine that I'm listening to this:

Who profited?

If you think I will wade into the public with an opinion on health care in this forum, you're nuts enough  to be reading this blog.  Well, I shan't.  I will leave that to the crabbing savages on Fatebooth. 

But!  Conspiracies are all we have, right?  If things didn't go your way on this, or if they did, it's obviously the result of some elaborate skullduggery!

Which brings me to this - in those crucial sixty seconds when news outlets had the court results posted incorrectly: who profited during those sixty seconds? I want you to think on it.  Currencies and deals can move at the speed of fiber-optic housed light!  Bottomless fortunes could be made in those miniature eons.

Give up?

Well, what if I tell you it was the descendants of EZRA POUND???

??????????????????

My dad, brothers and me, 1995?

Cheers!

But Monday morning.  Overcast.  9:30. I will go to the dentist in half an hour, and I would like a drink.  I write, at breakfast, the biography of a man whose dependence on alcohol was extreme, but who, through some constitutional fortitude, was able to ration his drinks, to exploit alcohol rather than have it exploit him.  He never drank before noon and, after his lunch drinks, not again until five.  It was a struggle, it always would be and by the time he was fifty he realized there would be no suspension of the fight. He would never be able to pass the whiskey bottle in the pantry without sweating.  On Saturdays and Sundays he would paint screens, split wood, cut the broad lawns of Evenmere, looking at his watch every ten minutes to see if the time hadn't come for a legitimate scoop.  At five minutes to five, his hands trembling and his brow soaked with sweat, he would get out the ice, pour the beautiful, golden whiskey into a glass, and begin the better part of his life.

I swear I was nowhere around when this happened

A correspondent avers:

"1995 looked so cute, at least in magazines."

Not shitting you here,

the little set of kids from across the street were over the other night checking in on Rafe (they brought him some cigarettes, which was sweet of them) and five year old Ari (sp? a girl, anyway) looks at your correspondent and says: "You look like Michael Jackson!"

Was it the little odd bits of tape on my fingers?  The flourescent pink sequin necktie?  What?

The return of Rafe Golightly

Twin Peaks mugs

Yes, sold out and even then they were 38 bucks apiece, the sherriff ones.  The RR's were $18.  Sold out!

From the inbox

A miscellany of attachments that have filtered blogward in the last few days:



And these are just a sampling of the things readers send in, knowing I will find them fascinating!

Thank you all!

Wait! A song I like not by people who are old and broken

More old people things

Fuck this oncoming oven-heat!  New Pet Shop Boys coming in the fall.  New single imminent!:

Useful word alert!

Saw this in the Boris Johnson thing in New York summer double ish, natch ["It's a problem of affluence and acrasia, moral weakness"]:

Acrasia


A*cra"si*a\, Acrasy \Ac"ra*sy\n. [Gr. akrasia.] Excess; intemperance. [Obs. except in Med.] --Farindon.

While I may be a fabulist,

particularly for the sake of a good post, I do think I am a reliable narrator.

Some may disagree!

Hot, Hot, Hot

I mentioned the Cure last October 31st, as I'm sure you remember.

Not my favorite band ever, but still crucial to one's 80's high school experience, when slinking about in a long "Echo and the Bunnymen" coat and reading fucking The Fountainhead.

When I heard it was going to 450 degrees this week, I immediately went to the external hard drive to liberate Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, which, though the Cure is a very rainy-day band, is a record that always puts me in mind of high summer.  "Torture" makes me think of cutting the grass at 783 Willowdale.  "Hot, Hot, Hot!!!" [three exclamation points] reminds me of hanging out in air conditioning-free, pot-befogged houses on Chambers and Alberta streets, hoping no one noticed I didn't know how to skateboard.  "All I Want" was the soundtrack to my teenage broken heart (along with Descendents' All, of all things).

Anyway, last week was on Standing on the Beach.  Let's all pray that this unbecoming "Cure phase" is brief!

I like this album cover I saw on Pitchfork

Don't know anything about the music, but:

Not sure what either

Emma Stone nor Jamie (sp?) Pressley are about, really, but shouldn't they play a mother and daughter in something?

A truth

[?] Don't Exist [?] Loyalty Does

[Guesses on a post card...]

¡Oye, Rafe!

Some things done by various correspondents o'er the weekend

Interesting people from exotic lands were met! (GA)

Fences were finished! (MN)

Protein shakes from riders were absconded with (possibly)! (greater
Chicagoland)

Call Snoopy

There was a super-cheese with extra sauce on Saturday.

Suck it, Gardner!

Nick Eddy, documentarian

I asked the Bride recently whether she thought I had the acuity to learn iMovie.  Her look of incredulous disdain left me bedridden.

No matter!  I need to take the iPad around and make a documentary film about people's first experiences/life-changing moments/impressions of/thoughts on the 1987 New Order single "True Faith"/"1963."

I could ask school kids, prisoners, celebrities, people in nursing homes - just everybody.

Or just go guerrilla, kicking open random suburban screen doors and interrupting re-watchings of The Big Bang Theory and forcing stunned residents to listen to both sides and then tell me why they ever bothered to go to church in the first place!  Filming the results.

Anyway, first a little movie then a whole channel of this, just people talking/discussing/reflecting on this single twenty-four hours a day.

No, two channels.

Heh

Big face!

Saw this awful framed art piece at the thrift store/urban reclamation place where I buy wood for garden stuff.

Shoulda bought and dropped from an airplane or something.

Fundraiser

If we have thirty beds (roughly forty people who participate, with spouses, kids, pets, etc) at the community garden, that means I should get 1500 - 2000 tee shirts pressed to sell, right?  Taking into account friendly passersby who are dying for them.

Looked in vain for the Pulp We Love Life font, but for now, something like this (left).

Maybe 10,000?

Like Scarlett O'Hara visiting Rhett in jail,

my hands are getting all rough and tumble (?) here in the summer.  Like a jackass, I fail to wear gloves all the time.  The blister here, incurred while shoveling/turning compost, has the hot sting of lemon juice on a hang nail.  Fun!

NOT actually called a "you know...no motor, just goes clacka-clacka-clacka...one of those"!

My little Gatsby-era mower (twin of which is pictured) is, in reality, referred to as a reel mower.

Got a sharpening kit (a strange, liquidy powder stuff that one brushes on, and then it scours itself away and the blades to sharpness with a minute of pushing to and fro) this weekend and brought ol' Choppy back to life.  AND learned so much in the bargain.

So, so much.

Thirty years ago today!

Weekend

Knighthood requested

They call Justin from the Darkness "Sir Justin," or at least Po does. 

I'm a have a bit of trepidation about their new record, the first songs exposed having not been the greatest things ever...but the man has a tattoo of a cassette tape on his chest and for that alone he must be celebrated!