Italian Opera and the Windy City

Many (well, I don’t know how ‘many’ of you there are, I suspect I can count on one hand) of you know that while I work in a techie field, I am not necessarily a tech fiend. I don’t jump on social networking sites (for kids), I don’t worship at the altar of Steve Jobs (the economist begs to differ), and I still insist on keeping a Yellow Pages in the house, because they’re useful dammit (and I think in some instances faster than the internet). However, I do love me some Internet. I get to consume hours of content (of questionable taste and usefulness) every day. I do research, deep dives into esoteric topics, keep on top of whatever political vein I follow, and make attempts to keep tabs of what pop culture I can get my hands on. I can easily see what the top songs in Itunes are, then make a quick listen so the next time I hear new music out in public, I (theoretically) know what it is. M tends to do better at this than I do, but I digress. I’m plugged into a few websites that do a decent job of digesting what’s out there and giving me the easy version of it so I have knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep. This is the way I like it. Last night the internet rose up to meet my expectations once again. There I was, sitting on the train, reading my ink and paper New Yorker, when I came across an article about a dead composer. His life sounded interesting so I decided to hear what his music sounded like. I pulled out the iphone, fired up youtube and searched for him. I found a few samples, took a taste and quickly spat it out. Disgusting (Iannis Xenakis, in case you were wondering). So I had youtube open, classical on the mind, and a longtime question came to mind. What was that music playing as Max Cady was driving around in his Mustang convertible? This is a reference to Martin Scorsese’s 1991 film ‘Cape Fear’. Max Cady (Robert DeNiro) was a generally bad dude, who instantly became somewhat awesome to a 14 year old in the opening scene of a hardened prison character with a gigantic cross tattooed across his shoulders and down his back doing a hard core prison workout and exuding the personality of a rattlesnake. So there’s this one scene where Max is driving around, blasting some opera music and ticking off the checklist of movie madman (psychopathic personality – yes, inexplicable affinity for high culture/art – yes, thinking 5 steps ahead of everyone else – yes, alternately menacing and charming everyone – yes), and this music was really cool sounding. It had this great quality of being triumphant and enlightened and ol Max just looked like he was doing whatever he wanted. This was great 18 years ago and it still is. Except I have no idea what the song was. It’s not on the soundtrack (movie soundtracks never have the good stuff). Movie Credits are really hard to find online. And it sounded too old and Italian to be something created just for the movie. Previous web searches came up empty, but maybe this time I’d get lucky. There was my answer – Gaetano Donizetti’s ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ – Per te D’immenso Giubilo – I’m not an opera person. Wikipedia says Donizetti was pretty good at it though. This loosely translates to ‘immens jubilation for you’ and it sort of sounds like a celebration, which is what I was having when I found it. I’m sorry it took a character like Max to get me to go searching out classical Italian opera, but if that’s what it takes…

I just got back from a trip to Chicago (work, not pleasure). I love Chicago. Something about it resonates with me. It’s new(er). I guess completely burning down can have a decent effect on your city. San Francisco has a similar feel to it. It’s huge, but not as overwhelming as NYC seems. It doesn’t stink, the people are mostly polite. There’s a whole lot less car honking and crazy driving. For some reason it just seems more civilized. Maybe it was just the parts I see, but that’s the way it is. I was there over the weekend and tried to do a little sightseeing, which is more than I do when I travel for work. Unfortunately I was sort of on call, so I couldn’t wander too far. On a recent trip to Toronto some coworkers and I went on field trips to find great burgers. This is a noble task. Here is almost zero chance of finding a bad burger, and you get to do a little traveling. So why not find the good burger in every town? Chicago had a highly ranked burger about 10 miles from where I was staying, so I jumped in a cab and headed out. Unfortunately, as M and I discovered in an attempt to go to a great pizza place in Brooklyn, when there is a highly regarded establishment in a gigantic city, there is a good chance it will be completely overrun. And this was true in Chicago as well. I took a $25 cab to the middle of nowhere and completely struck out. If I was with a group, there is at least some camaraderie or shared excitement for the endeavor, which can spur people to withstand long outdoor lines in rain/snow/deep freeze. When one is alone, that excitement is considerably lessened. I took a look at the line and crowded bar and said hell no. I crossed the street to get a cab going the other way. As soon as I crossed, I peeked in a bar window and saw people being served truly epic looking burgers. As much as I wanted to flip the whole endeavor the bird, I was starving and these looked amazing. The bar was empty, the Olympics were on, so why not? I sat down, ordered the burger and struck up a conversation with two heavily tattooed and pierced guys who were pounding Pabst Blue Ribbon in between Marlboro breaks. They were cooks at the place I tried to go initially, and they HATED it. They came to where I was sitting now to get burgers. The way I see it, if you want a goo d haircut, don’t go someplace where everyone cutting hair has a good haircut, go to the place they go to get their hair cut. I was eating where the best burger cooks in Chicago go to get burgers. I was not disappointed. I suppose my favorite aspect of the burger was the pretzel bun. This is going to be incorporated into all summer burger cooks from now on. In case you were wondering, the first place I wanted to go can be found here http://www.kumascorner.com/food and the place I ended up at is here http://www.squarechicago.com/square_menu.pdf - I got the ‘Big Square’.

Along by travels, I stumbled across a restaurant called Bice. This is another happy accident with en equally long winded story. On our first vacation together, M and I went to Quebec/Montreal for a long weekend. In Montreal, as we strolled the July streets, we decided to get dinner at a place called Bice. It was a memorable dinner, one of the first meals of truly excellent food we shared. Bice has a few locations around the world and we decided to try them as we traveled to world. Not to travel exclusively to eat at these places, but if we happened to be in town with one, we’d stop in. First we found one in Orlando. I forget what I ate, but M tried the Osso Bucco with saffron risotto. Well, at least we learned that we don’t like saffron. Not the greatest, but a nice little diversion. Next, we learned there might be in Monte Carlo – we looked and it was long gone. I just realized today there is one in Madrid, but can’t find anything else on it. If we had known, maybe we would have looked, but I think we did pretty well for eating in Espana. Of course we could have gotten lost and then had a hungry fight and then regretted it, so best to let that one slide. Well I found one in Chicago, the menu looks good, and I know for certain where it is. There may be a weekend trip in the near future.

Speaking of cooking, look at this stove. For those of you not into hand enameled custom built cast iron French ranges, this is a La Cornue Chateau 120. It starts at around $11,000. This particular model was in the employee kitchen of the office I was in. You’ll notice the granite countertop. They don’t use it for a stove. Towels are currently being stored in the ovens. I offered to take it off their hands if they didn’t want it. My offer was politely declined.

The last picture I’m going to share is of some spray painted silver sticks in a tall glass cylinder with glass beads in the bottom. Oh yeah, I’ve seen these before: at our wedding. M and I were way out in front of that one. Granted the concierge at the W Lakeshore gave me some weird looks, but forget him. This was too good to pass up.

Movies - The Hurt Locker. Watch this movie now. It’s really good. Not quite an action movie, not quite a war movie. Not a tourist film for the middle east. The Ladykillers – kind of weird, even for the Coen brothers. Not particularly recommended. Surrogates – this was better than I expected. Good to see Bruce Willis still has a fastball. And it was shot in Boston. Always nice to see Boston in the movies. Fast and Furious – I don’t know why I like these movies so much. This was another monster addition to the franchise. I’m looking forward to the next one. So good. John Adams – period film by HBO. Long, historical and really entertaining. I wanted to brush everyone’s teeth in it though. Good to see they got 18^th century oral hygiene correct. Not a kindly portrayal of King Louis. Slumdog Millionaire – very watchable.

Fridays rule

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSDkwnAnkfM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMM9O9Ftixg&NR=1

I can't take full credit for these, but I will put them up as examples of people with access to free soda and a small mean streak

Things heard on the commuter train

The other day I was listening to a podcast with Hollwood director Jason Reitman. He recently won a golden globe for his screenplay for ‘Up in the Air’, which M and I saw and both enjoyed greatly. He also directed ‘Juno’ (we liked that as well) and ‘Thank You For Smoking’ (I have not seen that one yet). He is also the son of famous and mega successful producer/writer/director Ivan Reitman. On the surface it seems like this guy should be a monumental tool. He joked that he was so at ease in the Beverly Hilton because he’d been to so many Bar Mitzvahs there. Boo Hoo. Growing up in Beverly Hills is so hard to do. He talked about how he had every privilege and consideration, never had to worry about where his next dollar was coming from, etc. But he also discussed how difficult it was for him once he decided he wanted to be a director. Being the son of an already successful director, one would think that daddy could pull some strings and get him some easy work. This might work in some slacktastic world like politics or law, where there seems to be a plethora of legacy country club overpaid hacks, but in other professions you have to have some actual talent and being a relation of someone famous can be a hinderance. I am sure Michael Jordan’s sons get guarded extra hard by defenders who want to say they shut down MJ’s kid and he sucks. Being the scion of a great talent means you’re always going to be compared to them and not your actual peers. The point it, Jason Reitman told a very sad tale about how no one wanted to work with him and he got his start with lots of commercials and small Sundance-type films. Now he’s an award winning director, working with A-list stars and his movies and scripts get tons of critical buzz. And he’s 32 years old. WHAT? Come on. When I heard that, I wanted to toss the iphone off the train. 32? (it must run the family – Ivan Reitman’s Animal House came out when he was 32. Since then it’s been Meatballs, Stripes, Ghostbusters - all good ones – ending with My Super ex Girlfriend in 2006 at the ripe ol age of 60). I’m 32 and I have no industry awards to my name. I don’t even know what awards my industry gives out. I know I’m the same age as Tom Brady and he has 3 superbowl rings and an MVP award. But most pro athletes are finished by age 30, and I didn’t exactly live at the gym during my teens and 20s, so I am not feeling any pain there. And at least I won’t limp when I’m 50. Most musicians blow up well before their 30s. If you’re trying to make pop music in your 30s, forget it. I can’t even sing Happy Birthday, so I don’t allocate and shelf space to missing Grammy’s. Plus, the really legendary musicians are dead by 27 and I’m way past that. And John Mayer really is a douche.

I’m not just saying that. Pardon the sidebar, but he was in the NYTimes, talking about his watch collection. I’m a big fan of watches and know a lot about them. From what they showed, I was unimpressed. There’s one pretty boring Patek Phillipe he owns, it has a bunch of diamonds on it, and he’s up there bragging about how unique and spectacular it is. There are a hundred similar looking pieces out there. “I have a Patek Philippe 5971 — platinum perpetual calendar, diamond baguettes on the bezel. I know it to be the most beautiful watch with diamonds”. Patek Phillipe is the Rolls Royce is watches, don’t get me wrong. But it’s expected for a rich guy to own one. I would never expect a ‘car guy’ to actually drive a Rolls or Bentley. Give me something interesting, something rare, exceptional. It’s the default ‘I have a ton of cash’ toy with a shiny label. Everyone knows Rolex and Patek Phillipe, Rolls Royce and Ferrari. Give me a Richard Mille or HD3 for a watch, give a Koenigsegg or Gumpert Apollo for a car. I want something that no one I ever meet will know anything about. Ok Rant over.

Van Gogh was pretty much washed up by 32. Of course he was insane and killed himself at 37, but that’s not an excuse. It’s well documented that math freaks do their best work by their early 20s. If you’re not a certifiable math celebrity by 28, get a new line of work. So here I am, 6 months from being 33 and I don’t have the great lifetime accomplishment anywhere on my horizon. I know everyone thinks, deep down, when that look in that mirror every day, scratching their armpit, that they are above average. I hate to break the news, but that’s mathematically impossible. At least half of us are below average. There are 3 billion people below average. Of course there are 3 billion above average as well. Maybe I am one of them? The comic book industry makes a lot of money off the premise that hidden deep inside ever cellar dwelling pale skinned geek is a super power just waiting to reveal itself. I’m not holding out hope for my flying abilities to one day just appear.

In the middle of a segment about how directors have their most creative period, Reitman had the courtesy to mention that for directors, that creative burst tends to come in their late 30s and early 40s. He’s in his peak now because he started earlier. So maybe my peak is just about to happen? I’m worried that I peaked sometime in 2005, right about the time I was crushing Madden and tearing up the streets of Grand Theft Auto in record style. Playstation2 could have been my big moment and I just let it fly by. Actors have the luxury of having extended peaks, because they get to grow with the roles they are offered. Maybe you can’t pull off the grizzled Army General when you’re 23, but you have the young soldier role. For non-actors, maybe there isn’t a peak? When I think of a peak, I automatically assume that’s when you’re making the most money. From what I can tell, for white men, that’s when you’re 55 with a nice set of silver temples and Seacrest-white teeth. At that point, you’re in charge of something, playing a lot of golf and cashing checks with all sorts of commas. Creatively though, I bet these codgers best days are way behind them. I don’t know what the value of the old guy is, except to get along with the old guys at the top of the other businesses they deal with and call in accumulated favors for their own benefit. They rely on young people who want to work 80 hours a week to do the real work. So maybe I have another 23 years to go until I hit that peak? My great invention hasn’t flickered in the brain yet, the great novel sits cobwebbed and unwritten, the political career ended sometime in 1997; the modeling days at about the same time. On the flip side, street criminal has definitely passed me by. I think the peak age for that is somewhere in the teens or 20s. By 32 you’re dead or in jail. Hipster is also long gone. 32 year olds serving coffee with skinny jeans and Amish beards are straight losers. Good thing, too. Beards and I do not get along.

All new stuff

Welcome to the ‘10s, or something along those lines. It was a nice little break for the Christmas/New Year. Granted I didn’t take any actual time off (I’d greedily taken all my vacation already), but everyone else took time off, so that was pretty much the same as me taking time off. We got to see the Pops again. This time M managed to get front row seats on the top balcony. Having gone to the Pops for several years in a row now, we’d decided these were the best seats for the money. Way back in March or something M patiently waited for the tickets to go on sale. The day of the sale she logged on a few minutes early (just to see if she could) and bought the tickets. The scheduled time to begin didn’t seem to matter much. Fast forward to the night of the Pops the guy behind us demanded to know if we were season ticket holders. He’d tried to buy the tickets right at the designated start time and was unable to (they were sold already, sucker) and needed an explanation. I can imagine him sitting home and fuming for 9 months waiting for the day he could confront the people who got his seats. Unfortunately he was just a little guy and he ended up with 4 much bigger people sitting in front of him. Merry Christmas. Speaking of Christmas, M and I had done some last minute shopping that day in the Prudential and Copley Malls. During a lull in the shopping, I decided to stop in a jewelry store to look at a watch I’d seen in a magazine. A helpful salesman saw me enter and asked if he could help me and as confidently as I could muster, I said “do you carry the Yachtmaster II?” (I don’t know how you communicate II or III instead of 2 or 3, maybe it’s in the snobby tone) I didn’t need to say the ‘Rolex’ Yachtmaster II, for some reason he just knew what I was looking for. I flipped through The Economist a few weeks back and saw one of these for the first time and I made M take a look because I thought it was a particularly handsome watch. Now I’d done some minimal research to see if this was even a possibility, but at $30k+ this was not the case. Regardless, I gladly took hold of the shiny chunk of Swiss craftsmanship. I mentioned some of the features to show I knew what I was holding and the salesman asked if I would be talking it home today. I laughed and said he’d have to take my car in trade, to which he replied that they offered a sort of ‘sign and drive’ option for people who were expecting big bonus checks or something. Then I casually asked what he charged for the watch, and then threw out a range that I was expecting and he said I was dead on. I took his literature and went back to my shopping, telling him that I’d be back when that check arrived. An hour or so later, M arrived and I wanted to show her what I’d found. The salesman immediately recognized me and waved me right over. M was unimpressed. That was when I noticed the watch didn’t have a date feature. I don’t know what else it did, but for that much cheddar they should include a date. Earlier in the month M and I went to the New England Auto Show. While we looked seriously at cars we could ostensibly one day afford, we spent a good amount of time in the big boys toys, pretending to drive to our various vacation homes. In one such car, the Audi A8, another man was sitting in the driver seat, looking unimpressed. We chatted briefly and I informed him that I much preferred the Lexus LS and again named some things I liked about it. He said he agreed completely and offered me his card and told me to come on down for a good deal on a Lexus LS. He was a salesman and was scouting the competition. While it’s good to know that I can pull off either the “I have so much money, I dry myself in a towel made of $50s” or the “I am ridiculously irresponsible, take money I don’t have” look, I don’t know what I will do with my newfound powers. Christmas weekend was a long one, but in a good way. It was the three days of Christmas, minus the turtle doves and partridges, pear trees etc… M and I did a ton of eating (ok I did a ton of eating, M was very well behaved), including at least an entire pound of nuts (or more). We’d made 3 lbs of spiced nuts to bring to various get-togethers and I ate lots of these nuts at every event and then for days after. I know I abraded my tounge from scraping nuts residue off my teeth. It’s only now healing. We participated in a few yankee swap-type things and ended up with decent kit from these. I have to send the anonymous shout out to the saint who rescued me from the snuggie. The traditional gift giving was also a big hit. One of the more interesting gifts I received was a talking alarm clock. You say hello to the clock and it responds and then you do everything you would normally do with an alarm, but without pressing buttons, only talking. At first this seemed cumbersome and I sort of wanted the old war horse I’d had for 15 years, but now I’m loving it. It’s kind of cool to call out across the room and get the temperature or change the time. I am also now the proud owner of an espresso machine, which changes things considerably. It uses little espresso cartridges, so I am spared the grinding and packing associated with the mess and hassle of espresso machine. Now, armed with my (also new) milk frother, I can make as many triple grande lattes as I deem necessary. I’m not giving up on coffee in any way, but I think I’ll be having a few more afternoon espressos in the future. Soon I can stop shaving regularly and start wearing skinny clothing and forming opinions on everything and gesturing a lot with my hands and driving a little scooter around.

Some movies I’ve seen recently:

Public Enemies - not my favorite Michael Mann film, but very watchable. Starts kind of slow.

Avatar – See this in a 3-D Imax theater if you can. Really cool.

-Someone named Stephen Lang has a pretty significant role in both Avatar and Public Enemies. I’d never seen him before, but he’s apparently a big actor on the stage. I liked him better in PE.

Transformers 2 – This is on a lot of 10 worst lists. I disagree. Bad, but there are many worse. Picking on Michael Bay is too easy. Do some real work, critics…

District 9 – original, gritty, shocking. The more I think about this, the more I like it.

500 Days of Summer – another original, new film. I don’t think I could classify it as a comedy, but it had funny or cringe inducing moments.

Extract – Not as funny as I’d hoped. My least favorite of this bunch.

New Year’s eve was an mostly uneventful night. I avoided exploding pyrex this year, but what would New Year’s Eve be without a kitchen spectacular? This year I made a Stromboli. First, because they are delicious, and second because I made it myself and no one can tell me to save some for the guests, as had been the case many, many years ago. M and I carefully selected the ingredients, then I roasted some garlic and made a special olive oil with the garlic. Carefully I rolled out the dough and twisted up a delicious masterpiece of meats, cheeses and vegetables. Into the oven it went for a nice slow cook. After a while I started to hear some sizzling and went to investigate. A thick orange slick of grease was leaking out of one end and sizzling as it hit the oven rack, so I rotated the Stromboli to make sure that end would no longer droop. Sizzling turned out to be the least of my worries. I started to hear a new noise coming from the oven. Sort of like someone punching a pillow. When I opened the door, I saw bigger drops of grease falling directly on to the heating element and exploding into fireballs. The punching pillow sounds were grease bombs going off in the oven. Of course a huge plume of smoke came pouring out and M and I were forced to open the doors and windows into the 15 degree night. Luckily the Stromboli was not permanently injured. New year’s was not the only night of cooking disaster though. During Christmas dinner I confidently bragged that I hadn’t had a big disaster in a long time because I had such good instincts and knew how to fix most things. Cue the ticking time bomb for Sunday night… M and I decided to host some friends for dinner. We were going to make a roast beef of some kind, asparagus risotto and a banana pudding. The banana pudding was to be a copy of the magnolia bakery recipe that we’d enjoyed so much when we were in NYC. I figured it was just bananas, pudding and banana bread. M strenuously objected to this and suggested we seek a recipe out. We found one that involved mixing pudding with ice cold water and letting it sit overnight, which we did. Come next morning and we still had a giant bowl of runny muck and no pudding. After a little research we figured we could cook the pudding and that did the trick. The banana pudding turned out to be fantastic, by the way. The dinner itself left something to be desired. I defrosted a tri tip roast, which I originally purchased for the grill. And that’s where it should have stayed. This was not suitable for a slow cooker and came out like sliced roofing shingles with only slightly less flavor. This was another online recipe and I am forever swearing off recipes that do not come from trusted sources. The internet is full of talentless hacks who think they can just throw anything up there. See the previous 2 pages for proof.

Christmas Came Early

Yesterday, while M and I were fighting through the barbarian hordes at the local Target, I had a strange sense of calmness. This serenity was not brought about any new tea I had been drinking or some meditation course I started, but rather because I had a new toy that I was excited to try out. No, I didn't get that flatscreen TV, PS3, 65 Shelby Cobra or Breitling Superocean Heritage (you listening, Santa?), but rather a snow rake. What is a snow rake, you ask? It's 14 feet of telescoping mayhem, made in New Hampshire and designed to scrape the snow off your roof. We had some ice dams last year that damaged the neighbor's condo and this year I don't want any funny business. M was kind enough to call ahead to the local Home Depot and reserve one for us. I was worried that our roof was too tall to use a snow rake on. The pictures online always showed a lower roof as the example, but when we picked it up, I was not disappointed.

So that's the rake. He's pretty ferocious. I was able to scrape a good 18 inches from the gutter and not kill myself in the process. I am officially an old b*stard now that I get excited about snow removal tools.

Here's the scene that greeted us today before I went out to clean the cars. The wind whipped the snow into some crazy-type drifts on the cars. M's car had the best high top fade I'd seen since the days of Kid N Play and Big Daddy Kane.

M and I also did all the Christmas wrapping yesterday, hence the need to go to Target. We tried to cheap it up and went to a Christmas Tree Shop the night earlier and we scored a ton of wrapping paper, but it turns out what we got was not the kind that's any good for wrapping (some of it was see-through. Seriously?) and not all that useful. So we wandered off to the Target to face the folks who were either stocking up for the coming snowpocalyse or Christmas shopping laggards. We got the paper and largely survived. Damn you Christmas Tree Shops. Well, not completely - you did have one of the more magical wrapping tools ever made. I will not spoil the surprise here though. Now that I am married and have family members expanding their own families through a variety of means, my Christmas list is growing like never before. I guess this is a none-too-subtle way of saying that the days of B going crazy for his peeps are over. Lord Bountiful has too many gifts to buy. Nobody's getting scratch tickets or secondhand rollerblades, but it's good stuff nonetheless.

Everybody's got one

AN An excuse, that is. Here's a meager list of them for why I haven't been posting:

II h I haven’t been home. I now spend a lot of time in Toronto. It’s not quite as cold as I had been led to believe. There are some funny accents, but nothing worse than what I hear on the train every day when I’m home. It’s a big international city with major sports teams, world famous landmarks and a long history. But they lack a food specialty. No one has a single signature restaurant to recommend. I’ve had some over the top burgers and a solid steak or two, but that’s about it. If you’re going there, eat before you go. When I wasn’t in Toronto, I was in Peurto Rico. That was ridiculously nice. Apparently I suggested going there after M and I got back from Spain. We had been rained/snowed on for a few of the previous trips and we wanted a hot sunny place. I was going to recommend Honduras, but then they had a military coup. Mexico’s gangs were killing everyone in sight, we’d already been on a cruise, so why not a pseudo-state that used the dollar and has direct flights from Boston? A week away from work, right before the winter sets in was a great idea. Unlike Toronto, PR has plenty of national dishes. They’re all fried, come with beans, rice and plantains and are delicious. Car rentals are cheap and the cars are exceptionally crappy so you don’t have to worry about denting them. The beaches were empty to the point that if we saw another person – anywhere in eyesight – we considered moving because the beach was too crowded. I wish I didn’t sound like a giant tool there, but it’s true. San Juan has some wild folks, though. Loud, bold, gold encrusted, flag-waving, craziness. M and I boned up on our reggaeton music before we left just so we’d have a hope of fitting in. Yeahhhh right. When I wasn’t up North or down South, I was in Connecticut wooing my bride for her birthday. I remembered M enjoyed tudor-style architecture and came across a B&B in a giant old Tudor mansion. I called to make a reservation and had a little difficulty understanding the innkeeper, but I was distracted and let it slide. Then when I called to confirm I realized there was something wrong with this fella. I had a really hard time understanding him. I kept picturing a chimp attack-style disfigurement that prevented him from speaking, but I kept this fear away from M, lest she start to have doubts. I mean, an innkeeper is the perfect job for a horribly disfigured person – you’re self employed, your work comes to you, you stay inside all day. I’m not being cruel. When a relatively normal man answered the door you could have heard my relief. A speech impediment is no big deal. Missing faces, sad to say, are an impediment to romantic weekends. In addition to all this there were multiple Thanksgivings, a multi course kosher/vegetarian/gluten Halloween dinner for 12 that actually tasted good and some other good stuff that I am sure I am forgetting.

I’m scared. Look at this mask M and I got in PR:

Add this to the masks we got in Venice and you’ve got a lifetime of terror hanging on the walls of only one room.

I' I’m glad we don’t have kids yet because the therapy bills would already be running. No eyes, unchanging expressions, surreal characters. I got spooked by a few weird pictures on the wall of my grandmother’s apartment. Imagine what these will do to a 3 year old! I just might put one on and chase a youngin around if I get the chance. Put another way though, and it seems like a less murderous version of trophy hunting. Back in the day a man such as myself would have spent a vacation shooting rare animals to make ashtrays, umbrella stands, combs and brush handles from their various appendages. Then I’d hang their heads in my study and swirl brandy in a cloud of cigar smoke while the ladies retired to the conservatory to gossip. There I’d regale my male guests with how I stalked and mortally wounded the great beast and twist my moustache with delight afterwards. Ah the good old days.

I I’m too busy reading. After my post about the great book swap, I realized my hypocrisy about attending a book festival and not being in the middle of an actual book. I took the opportunity of our trip to PR to start reading again. So far it’s been ‘Stupid White Men’ by Michael Moore who happens to be one of what he describes. I’m all for making fun of Dick Cheney, but Moore is advocating borderline anarchy. ‘The Cider House Rules’ by John Irving was one I had been putting off for a while. First of all it was huge – almost 700 pages. Second of all, I still had memories of a sappy Tobey Maguire movie trailer in my head, replete with the heavy voice over and inspirational music and old-timey clothes. I couldn’t imagine this was worth 700 pages, but it was and then some. John Irving writes a damn fine book. ‘The Road’ by Cormac Macarthy was an airport purchase. Cider was getting a little low, so I needed something to top off my tank and this looked suitably short. Plus there’s the movie with Viggo Mortensen (hopefully with less of Viggo’s viggo and more apocalypse horror) out that looks interesting. En route to Boston, the boozed up bunch behind me asked what I thought of the book, which I was really enjoying. I could tell this person didn’t do a lot of book-learnin’ and was fishing for someone to commiserate on her lack o’ unnerstannin of this here book. So I hedged and asked her opinion and sure enough, she’d quit halfway though. I give her credit for trying though. In her defense it was utterly lacking in transitions, names, explanations and continuity. And there was lots of cannibalism. Maybe it was all the human-hunting that put her off? ‘The Last Don’ by Mario Puzo was really frickin good. I carried this book around everywhere I went while I was reading it. Every chance I got , I was there in Vegas comping whales or in Hollywood bedding starlets or in the Bronx giving orders to take out people in the way of the Family. It was all old-school with that vaguely inappropriate accent that old guys speak with. You know, the one where you know they’re capable of saying something so outrageous and politically incorrect that you almost goad them into it because they grew up in another era and can’t help it, just so you can hear how the olden days were.

G G.I. Joe ate my brain. My god was this movie horrible. I love bad action movies. Transformers gave me goose bumps. Armageddon makes me cry. Fast and Furious and XXX made Vin Diesel a legitimate actor in my eyes. But G.I. Joe was just an inexcusable steaming pile of crap. I just deleted 15 sentences I wrote about everything I found wrong with it. Let’s just say I was embarrassed to be seen watching it. ‘The Cooler’ on the other hand was pretty slick. Alec Baldwin needs to be in more stuff. I was sad to see he ‘retired’ this week. Let’s hope this is a boxing champ style retirement and not a real retirement. I can’t get enough of Alec Baldwin making threats in his best monologue snarl. Good stuff. Maria Bello on the other hand – yikes. Between ‘A History of Violence’ and ‘The Cooler’ she’s got a solid 5 minutes of screen time of almost hard-core nudey footage going on. These flicks need a warning on them. Wait.. they do. I just ignore them. Maybe I shouldn’t be watching on the train… ‘House of Games’ – David Mamet’s directorial debut. The man can write the crap out of a screenplay, but this directorial effort was a little shaky. I think it was the actresses’ fault because I haven’t seen her in anything before or since. Big props for young Joe Mantegna and JT Walsh as con men. Since his death a while back, I had forgotten J.T. Walsh died in almost every movie he’s been in, but you can check it out. He’s one of those actors who dies in every movie he’s cast in. Gary Busey is another. Unfortunately neither of them makes movies anymore so we are denied this thrill. ‘Blood Simple’ is the scarily enjoyable original Coen Brothers’ film. These two are in my top 3 favorite director list, along with Michael Mann and Martin Scorcese and this film has all their hallmarks.

I’ve been searching for music. No Kanye this time. Have you ever been watching something and heard a cool snippet of something and wished you knew what it was. I know there’s an ‘app for that’, but how often do you have your Iphone open and ready to fire up that app that tracks down music for you? That’s insane. By the time the stupid phone decides it wants to open and launch your app, that song will be long gone. I was watching Bad Boys 2 the other day and there’s a song that gets played every time Johnny Tapia comes on the screen. It’s not quite Crockett’s Theme, but it’s close. It’s a sort of reggaeton/cubano hip-hop jam. But I don’t speak Spanish so I have no idea what they’re saying. It’s not on the soundtrack, because the good music is rarely on the official soundtrack. I had to scour Youtube looking for the scene and fortunately there’s a whole world of people who agree at the swaggertasticness of this bit of music. Of course ITunes doesn’t have it. If I wanted to download the latest Creed crap I’m sure they’d have it, but I think the last 5 times I went to ITunes looking for something they had it twice and flawlessly let me down the other 3. Not to be outdone, I scoured the flearidden underbelly of the series of tubes and found it. No pirate bay or bittorrent though. All legit here.

200

According to the nattily attired center panelist at the ‘Thrillers and Killers’ discussion, somewhere around 200 people make a full time living as writers of novels. 200! In the united States, that’s less than a 1 in a million shot. It’s one of those figures that sounds so incredible that it must be true. He didn’t back it up with anything approaching fact or citation, but it passes my sniff test. I am somewhat acquainted with a man who has published several books. One was even turned into a major motion picture. He does not smoke cigars on his yacht in St Tropez. He works a regular job and this book thing probably gets him a nice check every once in a while. By the way ‘Thrillers and Killers’ was a session at the 1^st Annual Boston Book Festival that M and I attended last weekend. This particular gathering matched spy/thriller novelists with a terrorism expert from Harvard. M and I went to a few other sessions, which were overwhelmingly crowded. Maybe it was rain, maybe Boston is a book-learnin type of place. I know I saw a Ken Burns groupie or two (we missed his talk due to overwhelming crowds). The sessions all had their own themes, but for the most part it seemed like the discussion always went back to what it was like to be a writer and to describe each particular writers’ creative process. It seems that professional writing is not an easy thing, despite what I had secretly, deep down believed. I was a somewhat talented ‘english person’ back in the day. I went to schools where teachers saw I could read harder books and they sent me to the big kids’ section on the library. I read a lot of challenging books and I think I did a decent job of regurgitating what I read. Book reports were never something I dreaded. I was given much praise and encouragement (not from 10^th grade Mr. McCarthy though) and the cycle repeated itself. I got nice standardized test scores, got the awards, etc, and off to college I went. In hindsight choosing majors and classes by what time they were scheduled was probably not the best path, but it worked. I took a lot more English classes, albeit of the analytical, not the creative variety. Lots of poetry and dusty Milton ensued. Graduation approached and various older people started asking me if I was going to be an English teacher when school was over. Hell no, I was going to be an investment banker! (I think I covered this somewhere else). Or at least get something to pay the bills while I wrote by manuscript/novel/manifesto. I knew a movie script was 120 pages long – how hard could that be? I made a few hesitant stabs at it and realized I have no mind for dialogue. There’s something else I have no appetite for – revisions. Mr. McCarthy had a real thing for rewrites. He never graded a paper the first time it was turned in. He’d make some notes, hand it back and give you a second chance. What? No way was I doing that again! My first shot was good enough. So I’d hand that sucker right back at him and take my grade. The twist was that you could do this indefinitely. If you didn’t like your C, you could keep rewriting it until it was an A. I couldn’t be bothered. Apparently rewrites and revisions are quite commonplace in the professional writing world. After I’d write a few scenes down, I’d take a look at them and realize how bad they were, but the idea of re-doing all that work was too much. Maybe movies weren’t for me. Books are where I’ll make my fortune. I’m constantly eavesdropping on people, analyzing their situation, noticing interactions – all . with a running dialogue in my mind, connecting them in a grand plot or saving good interactions for scenes the next day or whenever I feel like it. Writing a book would be easy. Or at least, writing a few good scenes would be easy. Once I got a some killer scenes, the plot would take care of itself. I tried that – there are more than a few aborted novels filled with ultra macho action and violence tucked away on every laptop I’ve ever handed over to the IT guys. I really don’t care if anyone reads them. I usually run out of steam after the first 800 words or so. Then the idea of re-writing it? No freakin way. You may notice how long some of these blog posts are and realize they are way past 800 words – that’s dumb luck. And while I may rewrite a sentence or two or change a word, there is consistently zero rewriting done. So back to the 200. Who are these people? I saw three of them on this panel. One of them was a Yale law Professor – sounded like he had a decent day job. One had been recruited to work at the CIA at a young age but realized it wasn’t all spies and guns. The third guy, spouting statistics, seemed to be the only ‘normal’ guy, i.e. not already endowed with super skills/intelligence/determination that would correspond well to crafting a page-turning novel. Dan Brown? John Grisham? Dean Koontz? I know I make fun of these guys, but if that 200 number is correct, these guys are more obscure talents than professional basketball players. They’re rarer than billionaires (and if you’re JK Rowling, you’re both). Luck seems to have little to do with this. I’ve read business case studies that analyzed thousands of years of man-days worked by all sorts of business executives. These studies then asked the executives why they made certain decisions and what resulted from these. The end result was basically luck. You can’t ask someone who flipped a coin on heads 10 times in a row how they did it, nor, so it seems, can you ask many executives what the secret to their success is, since it’s all conjecture and mostly luck. None of the authors had similar stories. Some outlined their arcs, others waded in with the writing. It seems the secret to writing a bestselling novel is to somehow capture the attention of a good agent and editor and publisher who can then propel your book to the most shelves and hope lots of people buy them. Of course the internet makes this all the more difficult. Anyone can publish a book these days. Anyone can fling opinions around in an article and get noticed. Very few get paid and ever fewer make all their money from it. I wonder if this 200 ever get together like the Spartans from 300 and howl and chant to fire themselves up and revel in their virtuosity. That’s probably what these book fairs are, actually. Get a bunch of authors together, let them measure each other up and decide who’s got the most best sellers, who’s a hack, who’s a genius. Wave around a few glasses of Cabernet and quote philosophers and try to look profound. Sounds like fun. Doesn’t mean I don’t have a novel in me, but it definitely means I can’t quit my day job.