That One Temper Trap Song.

Is it possible to not love this song?



I know that this album has been out for a long time and that the song has been in the cultural ether for a long times as well (you heard it in “500 Days of Summer” and in that one Diet Coke commercial that made it seem like drinking Diet Coke was cool and I’m sure in many other places), but dammit, I just love it. I happened to randomly pop this CD in today while driving (yes, I still primarily use CDs because I find that if I have my iPod in the car I am constantly fiddling with it instead of focusing all of my energy on not hitting anything while I’m driving) and was reminded of what a good song this is. In fact the whole album is really quite good and if you don’t have it you should get it. Or ask my roommate to burn you a copy because that’s how I got mine.

.
.
.

Get a Room.

Do you remember that part in 500 Days of Summer when Joseph Gordon Levitt is just post-break-up and living on whiskey and Twinkies? And on the street he sees a couple innocently holding hands? And he screams at them, “GET A ROOM!”

That’s what I feel like lately.


.
.

So I Had A Birthday.

So I had a birthday.

Yeah, it happened.

I had tried to avoid it, but it try as I might, I wasn’t able to stop it from coming. I went through that thing that you go through where I just wanted to ignore it (because I’m getting old old and older), but eventually I did what we all must do, I accepted it (more or less).

And used it as a simple excuse to have a small party. A small party is almost always good for the soul. Things that you missed:

My nearly falling over while trying to walk in heels

Discussions of a writer’s duty to embrace his/her bad decisions as a kind of art-enhancing ‘performance literature’

Threats of forced live West Wing reenactments!

My extremely liberal use of martini shakers

Scarf wearing!

Sweet tea vodka Arnold Palmers

Elaborate diagrams of interpersonal relationships

Explorations of pigeon languages

Velvet jackets (that’s right, plural)

It turned out to be both fun and gratifying. I have always enjoyed (and often missed) having a group of people who could drink and talk the night away (I’m seldom as happy as when my life becomes a little Left-Bank-of-Paris-in-the-‘20s situation).

Then when I woke up on my actual birthday, my roommate Eggplant (still test driving blog names for her) had filled up the apartment with red and yellow and blue and green balloons that she had blown up herself in the dead of night (we have left the balloons out to roll around on the floor and scare the cats and I have to admit that it makes the mornings a little more fun when you have to kick your way through a field of colored balloons on your way to the door).

Later we ran around down in the LA and went to MOCA, (which I had never been to!) and I got to stand really close to some Rothkos . . .





. . . and lean in close enough to them to make the security guard nervous . . .



I also encountered a couple of painters I had never heard of but quite like now:

Mister James Rosenquist, who painted this on oil and canvas, entitled Vestigal Appendage



And Mister Antonio Tapies who painted this stellar-ly entitled word, Grey and Black Cross, NO. XXVII


And of course there was Mister Warhol:



The little quote on the plastic white plaque beside this painting said, “Everybody has their own America, and they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see. When I was little, I never left Pennsylvania, and I used to have fantasies about things that I thought were happening . . . that I felt I was missing out on. But you can only live life in one place at a time . . . you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.”

Sing it brother.

After the museum we wandered down the hill into downtown and very nearly stumbled onto Angel's Knoll, a little stitch of a park (right next to and below Angel's Flight) on a hill overlooking part of Downtown. You, of course remember Angel's Knoll from that penultimate indie/hipster/film school (anti)romantic comedy (500) Days of Summer.

There are, BTW, significantly more bums in the park than in the movie, but it is a cool little place.

Later we meandered down through the (blingy!) Diamond District and then stumbled across to Clifton's Cafeteria (which I totally recognized from The Food Network). It is like an eighty year old cafeteria, an actual cafeteria, with plastic trays and everything! The interior is dark and cavernous and sort of like a forest. It looks like a cross between Disneyland’s Splash Mountain and Disneyland’s Splash Mountain eighty years after they stopped dusting and changing the light bulbs. If you find yourself there, get the macaroni and cheese, it’s so buttery and cheesy and greasy that it is almost soup. I’m still a little sick, it was the most disgusting/awesomest thing that I have eaten in ages.

Then later I got to see my parents as they passed through town and even later I got to log onto Facebook and look at all of the happy birthday wishes that people had left.

I try not to write too many things on this blog that are just about me and the humdrum mundane-ity of my life (this thing is supposed to be about the writing, after all), but it was my birthday, so I’m allowed to write things like this.

I wish that I had some newly discovered gem of wisdom to offer to you about getting old, but I really don’t. All I can tell you is that friends are good and that my roommate is awesome and sometimes it is fun to make museum security guards nervous. And otherwise, try to appreciate the good times when they come.

Okay, I’m done being all saccharin.



Thanks Jose for this awesome birthday video!

.
.
.

Mean and Awesome!

I totally forgot about this! When Val and I were in Boston, we got a bite to eat at this little café place on Charles Street in Beacon Hill and I picked up a copy of Boston’s free glossy magazine, The Improper Bostonian.

They have this movie critic working for them named Sean Burns and man is that guy a pretentious asshole! But in a good way!

First he did not really like much of anything, except for Hurt Locker (and even that, he was quick to point out, gets muddled in the second half). He even shrugged off 500 Days of Summer, which I disagree with (he made some good points and gave voice to a lot of the small complaints that curmudgeons like me have, but he missed the big picture, which is that it is a great movie).

However, he saved a special place in his tiny black heart for Transformers. His review spewed bile all over the movie, but I wrote down my favorite part of the review:

“… (Transformers is) nothing but the pulverizing fetishization of militaristic alpha-male privilege …”
Ouch.

Now I enjoyed the first movie, but I enjoyed it partly because it was crap. I have not seen the second one, but I bet it was just as craptacular!


*** I couldn’t find the review on their website, but the review was in The Improper Bostonian in the July 29-August 11 2009 issue on page 53 ******
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.