What does the Times have against Lamont?

Interesting that, now that Lieberman is destroying Lamont in the polls with a 10 point lead, the New York Times no longer sees fit to report extensively on the race. Come on, NYT. You're not doing your job! I want to be told again how great Lamont is, and on how evil Lieberman is.

Go Joe!

Regina Spektor

Riding back from Maryland with an old friend on Sunday night I got the chance to listen to a lot of music that I wouldn't normally enjoy. Most of it was good. Regina Spektor was great. I have found a new love. The song Fidelity - the one I heard in the car on Sunday night - is beautiful and moving. I don't know if people who are into music more than me know about her, but you all should. Here's a link to her website. Click on music, and then enjoy. It seems like all her albums are online for free. You won't be disappointed.

Now that you've listened, I can talk about it. She reminds me of a cross between Dido and Alanis Morissette. Her voice is simply beautiful. She goes so high, but she has the effect of whispering that Dido does so well. And the words are great. "The history books forgot about us / and the Bible didn't mention us / the Bible didn't mention us / not even once." That's from Samson.

I want to hear this woman live.

For those of you wondering where Part 2 of Good Magazine is, it'll come

Good (Great?) (Mediocore?) Magazine

So me and a friend (to preserve her anonymity, I will simply call her RPP) went to this party last week for Good Magazine. Good Magazine is a new, twenty-something-ish-type magazine which, miracle of miracles - unlike every other lame hip trendy twenty-something magazine, web-zine, tv show, rant, and blog - does not try to be ironic. God, we are so sick of irony. I am sick of you Heeb Magazine. I am sick of you, McSweeneys. I am so so so so sick of you, Dave Eggers. Go off into a cave and write another Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, because everything since then has pretty much been just Staggering.

Good Magazine is not about irony. It is about really interesting and informative, and, most importantly, non-ironic, issues. It is about being good (tm) (patent pending). It is, in a word, awesome. At least the first issue is. Really. I don't know why I am plugging them so much. They should pay me. But they don't. I'll move on.

Anywho, subscribers (as I and my loyal friend RPP are) were invited to a kick-off party in Chelsea at some super hip, trendy, and (unfortunately) incredibly ironic gallery. I thought it would be sort of casual, twenty-somethingy, so I wore jeans (gap $50) and a button down shirt (gap $50). Everything I own comes from gap and costs $50. I am non-ironic.

RPP was looking hot. But then again, RPP always looks hot.

Anyway, everyone was super over-dressed, and I felt like such an idiot, but then I didn't feel like an idiot, I felt like a guy who was waiting in line for 40 minutes to get into a party. When we finally got in, we got to see some neat weird, incredibly ironic art on the first floor of this coolish loft art gallery space. Most of the art, sucked. To be honest. There was one piece on the third floor that was really cool, though. But I'm not at the 3rd floor yet. We'll get there, in a paragraph or two.

There were a bunch of little galleries on the second floor. In one, which was really weird - one art piece was an open book - I accidentally ran into the artist, a very small probably forty-something Asian woman. After apologizing (she was only slightly bruised) we had an awkward conversation that went something like this:

Me: So, you made this stuff?
Artist: Yes.
Me: Which one's your favorite?
Artist (clearly taken aback): Um, I like that one (pointing to the far side of the room)
Me: How come?
Artist: Because it has a double meaning.
Me: You rock.

Ahh, it has a double meaning. Now I understand. I am one with the world.

Anyway, after waiting on line for about another thirty minutes to go up to the third (read: cool) floor, we finally didn't make it upstairs, because it was at capacity. Instead we found a bar downstairs and drank our sorrows away (non-alcoholically, of course).

Then, when we went back to get up to the third floor, we found it was magically free of people waiting to get up to it. We went up and had great adventures.

What were they, you ask? Well, I will tell you. But not today. At least not now. Our adventures will continue, in Episode 2, which I have cleverly titled (in advance): "Good Magazine: Part 2"

Teeth Cleaning

Has anybody else ever felt that they were drowning while having a routine dental cleaning?

I almost died today. I am sure of it. In the dentists chair. The dentist was incredibly nice. She was friendly, and although her English wasn't great I think I knew what she was trying to tell me. But then she stuck this thing in my mouth that shoots water in there. I know of this thing. I have seen it before. I have also feared it. But never before as a mortal enemy. Usually, in the past, I have been instructed, every once in a while, to rinse out the large amounts of water that this thing injects into my throat - keep in mind, I am lying back in the reclining dentist's chair, in a perfectly chokeable position - so, while the water shooting thingy (which, for no other reason than because I feel like it right now, I've decided to call a spigot), so, while the spigot has been a scary thing to my past, it has never been nefarious. But today, oh today was...different. I was never told to rinse. I was never told to spit out. Instead, I just lay there, helpless in the dentist's chair, as the water spigot filled my mouth with more and more water, which mingled with the blood from my teeth and whatever gross stuff was in there and threatened to kill me.

I ended up almost choking on my own blood and the water from the evil water spigot. Instead, I swallowed, closing my mouth as I did so. "What are you doing?" The dentist said, or I think she said. I couldn't really tell, through the choking and all. And then, "are you ok?" Either she said that or she was talking about something else, but I'm pretty sure she asked me if I was ok. "Fine," I said, causing myself to gag on what water remained in my mouth.

Which brings me to my next point: Why would anyone ever want to be a dentist? Anyone, I mean, of course, except for crazy sadistic masochistic freaks. Which my dentist, of course, was not. Especially if she's reading this. If she's reading this, I loved her very much, and look forward to being strangled - er, treated - again.

And I will be. I'm going back in a couple of weeks because, due to no fault of my own (I blame the water spigot) I have somehow developed two small cavities. And so, while my "oral hygeine is good", I "clearly never floss", (those both the words of my beloved dentist)...

Which brings me back to my original - er, second - point. Or maybe third. Why would anyone ever want to be a dentist? It's bad enough to have things stuck inside my mouth. But to have to stick things into other peoples mouths? To have to look at the insides of someone's mouth all day and to play around with metal implements in there and to tolerate onion and garlic breath and to be nice about it? I don't think so.

Bagels, Cream Cheese, Tuna Fish

You may think that two of the above three things are great together - there are some tuna on bagel people, and some cream cheese on bagel people, but there are very very (all too) few of you that would think that the three substances - all tasty delicious alone - would be tasty delicious together.

The vast majority of you, however, would be in the wrong. I have found that - for some reason, especially when I'm incredibly hungry - I desire nothing as much as a nice poppy bagel, topped with cream cheese, and bottomed with tuna (with a little lettuce and tomato to give it some extra oomph). Now, when I order the above delicacy at a bagel place, I am usually given an awkward stare by at least two people (the cashier and the guy waiting to order behind me) and sometimes by more (everyone else in the store, once). But the mix is amazing, I tell you. It is like manna from heaven. Everyone should try it, at least once.

That is all.

David Broza

I went to Jewzapallooza today in Riverside Park for the David Broza concert. I love his music - it's so chill, it makes me feel calm and alive when I hear him. This is the second time I've heard him in concert - he didn't play for so long this time, maybe 45 minutes, but I was right up front, and he sounded awesome. Looked a lot older than last time I saw him, 3 or 4 years ago, but I guess a lot has happened since then.

I didn't know about half of the songs he played, but they were all great. Mitachat La'Shamayim (under the heavens) is probably the most beautiful love song I know, in any language. I remember, every time I hear it, the one play I was in in college, when we played it during a scene where the entire cast was dancing in slow motion. It was Romeo and Juliet, and this was the scene where Romeo and Juliet first meet. We're all dancing, slowly, perfectly, and suddenly, Romeo and Juliet spot each other, from across the room (or in this case, because the play was staged outside, across the field), and move towards each other. We're all dancing, and the music is playing so softly, so slowly, and Romeo and Juliet are moving towards each other, and then they touch, just their hands, like touching a mirror.

I wasn't Romeo (or Juliet) in the play, by the way. I was the Prince. A perfect role for me.

The Broza concert, though, is what I was writing about. That song was great. And then he closed with his most famous song, Yiheyeh Tov (it will be good), which is also beautiful, but overplayed, and has become something of a modern classic Israeli peace song. I always think the narrator of the song - who keeps repeating, loosely translated, in the chorus, "It will be good, it will be good, yes, it will be good of this I swear" - is a lot like the narrator of Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn, who constently repeats the phrase "oh happy...oh happy, happy". Indicating, of course, that things are not happy. I love that idea, that too much of something means its opposite. It's often true. With the Broza song, as well. Maybe. And I think he understands that. Maybe.

Wallace Stevens

Quick question: Does anybody know of a good biography of Wallace Stevens? I was thinking about Stevens a lot today: about his tormented poetry, about the fact that he was a lawyer and his "real" life was probably so different from the excitement and newness of his poems, and I was wondering, then, how and what his life was like.

Actually, to get into it more, I was sitting in Riverside Park with the gf looking out at the Hudson River, and it was a beautiful day, it was Shabbos (the holy Sabbath), and I looked out and up and through the trees, and suddenly was pierced by the final and beginning images of my favorite (or one of my favorite) Stevens poem - Sunday Morning, about how it's all here and now, the beauty, and we should just appreciate it. I want to quote it. Maybe I will. It's basically about forgetting about the heavenly God or gods and focusing on the here and the beauty of the earth. And I got that picture, and then, almost coterminably, into my mind came the image of a sad, lonely, lawyer Stevens, sitting at his bland, melancholy desk and staring at a brown, unadorned wall. Who knows - maybe it's true or not. I wish I knew. Thus, the Stevens biography. I wish I knew the man. He was probably very crotchety. I love his poems.

Here is the last stanza of Sunday Morning:

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Reckless Rites

This is a book review published today in the Jerusalem Post. With a picture of the book cover here.

That said, I'm going to try to start making this blog more about posting actual messages and words and less about putting up some of the random things that I publish. No, no I won't. I'm not really sure what I'll do.

I saw Studio Sixty on the Sunset Strip's premier last night - it was pretty good. I don't think it's going to succeed - which is sad - it's sort of ridiculous that I'm getting sad that something won't succeed when it hasn't even failed yet - in fact, I don't think it's even premeired yet.

But I digress. For some reason (strangely, I think that the gods of NBC believe that you watch the premier for free, without ads, on tvguide.com, you'll watch it again, with ads, on Monday night at 10), as you can probably figure out by that aside, nbc put up the entire pilot on tvguide.com. You should check it out. Bradley Whitford (sp?) and Matthew Perry are great together - I think Sorkin realized this from the couple of episodes he had Perry do on the West Wing - which weren't great, but where the interaction between Whitford and Perry's characters was pretty strong. And having Danny Cancanan back (who the hell cares what his none West Wing name is - for me he'll always be Danny) - and playing a very Dany Cancanan like character (I'll let you see it for yourself) is always a pleasure.

I also love the self-referentiality of it all. The writer and director (both Sorkin, clearly) who both have bad drug habits they can't kick but are clearly the best in the business. Clearly. I use that word too much. The evil studio who needs Sorkin - oh, I'm sorry, who needs the main characters - but hates them just as much. It was genius, also, that Sorkin got in a huge and intense rant about the awfulness of television and could just blame it on a departing character. The show is great. I give it five episodes.

It was also great that while this was clearly meant to be NBC (Studio Sixty = SNL) someone up there who thinks all Americans are as idiotic as him or herself made sure to have a reference to another station named NBC - which the new President of this station - NBS (no similarities there) - was poached from. Wow, now I realize that this can't be NBC! What kind of idiots do they think we are?

And the greatest thing about it is, Sorkin - who probably wrote those lines, with NBC's approval in mind, knows we're not idiots. (And by we I mean the American public). He knows we're going to get it. But he also knows the higher ups at NBC won't think we will. I've missed you, Aaron.