July 2009
24 posts
The San Jose Bay Area
So many of the unprepossessing buildings in that city—what I call ‘anger architecture’—are incontestably grotesque, what in his day Bret Harte, a local, sardonically referred to as ‘Union Pacific Renaissance.’ Pathetically, both of the big building booms in San Francisco coincided with the emergence of ugly architectural styles, such as those monstrosities-on-columns from...
Clearn
Of all the brilliant Harvard-educated business minds I clumsily support, those that move along like the grandness of a company, one interests me in particular as a full person, and nothing interests me more about him than the beat of his typos. I must clearn up a document for him tomorrow. He has asked me to clearn up a document for him three times, and I do not know how that typo is made on a...
Type of Hangover
Wanting to hold Ecrits in your hands all day, read a page from time to time.
Like getting punched in the face
Hearing it referred to as Wrigley Park.
“Perhaps Charles Strickland’s power and originality would scarcely have...”
– Maugham, The Moon and Sixpense; (with “its” being the mythopoetic faculty of mankind)?
Double standards
Sexy on a woman: Openness, friendliness. Sexy on a man: Closed, boundary-obsessed.
“I do not like the major works, and I do not like the minor works.”
– Igor Stravinsky on the music of Richard Strauss, quoted in Allen Shawn’s Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey.
The album lives on in people's minds
I was standing on the corner of Clark and Addison last night, while Billy Joel was playing Zanzibar inside Wrigley Field, and a guy walked by and said to his girlfriend: “what song is this, ‘Big Shot’”?
1 tag
Chip on her shoulder
Difference between applying nail polish as a manicure, and applying nail polish because you are bored.
(c.f. for men: The desire to get a haircut for apperance, the deisre to get a haircut so that your head is touched.)
You can put down a track in the studio.
And then get down to it, or get on up.
You can put down thoughts on paper.
And then read a book you can’t put down.
“Story idea — a man marries a woman whose name is the same as that of his...”
– Percival Everett, Erasure
Repeats
Are Michael Jackson videos the new Golden Girls?
Wavves is the sound of today’s American youth!
Why do I say “I must be getting old” if I don’t keep up with music, but if I don’t keep up with novels or art or comedy I don’t.
Movies don’t count. It wouldn’t make sense to say “I must be getting old, I don’t keep up with the pictures.”
And video games don’t count but for different reasons. If I said “I’m too old to...
1 tag
Maurice Burkhart, It’s the Smart Little...
“The only way to have friends is to throw everything out the window, to keep your...”
– Joseph Joubert, 1783.
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Hungover Desk
Blackberry on its side, broken watch, Bazooka gum wrapper comics, Krunchers! bag finished, next to it napkin with BBQ sludge. 3 Diet Squirt cans, finished. Notepad with huge coffee stain. Corn chip stains on proposals. 6 missed calls.
(Where’s Joe?
He’s on a pony.
What makes you think that?
He said he was a little hoarse!)
Avondale
That the “old man bar” across the street from the “young girl restaurant” could be built in response to the restaurant.
An old man walking around the corner sees young people gathered at a storefront. A(n) (f)awning tribute to innovative design, a search engine name.
“I will build Joe’s Bar across the street from here. That will be my goal these final...
Cannot figure out which Mermaid Album song this...
Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19 (1911) Number 6. Played by Paul Jacobs in 1975 (released on Nonesuch, which in 2000 released Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.)
From Allen Shawn’s Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey: Pieces 1 through 5 were all composed in one day, on Feb. 19, 1911. The sixth was written on June 17, under the impression of Mahler’s funeral, which had occured on May 21. (Mahler died...
“In 1910, when Schoenberg was thirty-six years old, the painter Max Beckmann...”
– Allen Shawn, Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey.
“I started talking to myself a short time after my wife had left me because, so...”
– Moravia, He and I, More Roman Tales
For crafty they are, and full of falsehood, circumventing all men whom they are able, by their sleights.
Friar John of Pian de Carpini, on the morals of the Mongols, 1247.
