Month: June 2005

It’s a picture, and it’s worth a thousand words!

Evidently, Steven Spielberg believes that his new War of the Worlds flick reflects post-9/11 angst, instead of just being a summertime special effects monstrosity.

I think the movie poster shows that we have plenty in common with these aliens: we both like bowling.

Meanwhile, this makes me laugh more than the other foreign-language posters. Not sure why. Probably because it reminds me of the “Jews In Space” piece from the end of History of the World, Part I:

It was a wedding-plan weekend, dear reader, interspersed with some other entertainments. On Saturday, the official VM fiancee visited a Nicole Miller boutique and fell in love with a gown. At the same time, her parents were testing out the food at the venue where we’re planning to get hitched, down in New Orleans (they’re locals). Today, we bought a stone for The Ring, at a little jeweler in the East Village. (No hyperlinks for any of these places till they’ve done their jobs and I can guarantee their link-worthiness.)

In-between? We risked our very lives. And I’m not talking about today’s return-trip to New York during the Puerto Rico Day Parade.

Very rarely, I’ll find myself struck with a peculiar notion that supersedes every other priority. Saturday afternoon, for example, I noticed a remaindered-book warehouse-store, and it instantly became imperative to stop in. Why? I can’t really explain it. My library is over a thousand volumes at this point, and I’m still immersed in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which keeps me from opening any other book.

Still, we do as needs must, when the devil drives. Forty-five minutes later, I left with an armload of books, accompanied by a fiancee who has smaller arms and hence a smaller load of books.

Perhaps it’s a mood that makes me susceptible to these uncompromisable whims. I like to think I’ve been much more compromising and flexible in recent years, but how then to explain the mania that grabbed me later that evening? What possessed me, as we were doing our food-shopping Saturday evening, to grab this grotesquerie? To be fair, at the moment I picked up the Jack Daniel’s Mesquite EZ Marinader bag, I turned to my One True Love and said, “I’ll try this during the week, while you’re back in the city.”

But she’d have nothing of it. If I was going to brave a steak immersed in “EZ Marinade,” she’d be by my side. She’s a heck of a girl, that way.

So we bought a pair of unsuspecting steaks, got home, and placed them in the gelatinous muck of the marinading bag. I can’t believe I just wrote that. Anyway, the marinade needed a minimum of 30 minutes to dissolve the steak down to its constituent atoms and restore itself to life soak into the meat, so we gave it an hour while we took care of other stuff (I baked some pre-made/-cut cookies, while my girl stewed bananas in coconut milk). Then it was time for the show.

We put the steaks in the broiler. Because we’re the sort of people who bought Jack Daniel’s Mesquite EZ Marinader, the packaging comes with explicit instructions: namely, take the food OUT of the bag before cooking it. Yes, dear reader, it’s apparently necessary to warn consumers not to put A PLASTIC BAG into a broiler or onto a grill. We took the bag’s advice.

Ten or so minutes later, we got our brown-jelly-covered steaks out of the broiler. Most of the brown jelly seemed to have burned away, but we were afraid it was hiding somewhere in the broiler.

This is the last known picture of me, just a moment before my first bite. Fortunately, my digital camera has a bemusement-filter.

As it turned out, the marinade wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good, either. It was phenomenally generic. Two weeks earlier, Amy & I tried out a rib place here in NJ, but it turned out to be bar food, and the sauce on the ribs was “utterly adequate,” as she put it. These steaks came out the same way; we basically cooked up bar food at home, with better quality meat. Fortunately, we blew off Spirited Away for some Family Guy reruns, and offset the over-sweet marinade with a broccoli rabe and garlic side, but I think I learned my lesson: Never do anything on a whim in a supermarket.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to see how these frozen, microwave-able White Castles came out.

Went into the city last night for my friend Elayne’s birthday get-together. Her birthday was last month, actually, but she and her co-worker James decided to delay their festivities till the semester was over.

So we met at the Telephone Bar, where we had a room sorta reserved to hang out, drink, nosh, and gallivant. But first, I got a long-overdue haircut. I needed to get it cut for about two months, but kept getting delayed and then lazy. Eventually, I started looking like a big angry Q-tip, so I hit the Jean-Claude Biguine on E. 23rd and had a large, swarthy French-speaking guy “style” me. The final result was great. I felt like I was the best-looking straight guy at the party that evening. Not that anyone else believed it.

Anyway, here are some pix, which is all you’re really in this for. I can tell:

Some people talked.

Others sat in a comfyish corner.

Renowned author Samuel R. Delany put in an appearance! Even though Elayne asked me to bring my camera, she seems terrified that I’m taking this pic.

That’s better.

Both guests/hosts of honor! Belated happy birthdays abound!

I had a little too much gin last night, so I’m a bit run down today. I’m also working on a really writing-heavy issue of the magazine (as opposed to the issues where I get in a lot of contributed articles), so I’m outta words right now. I’m gonna go catch Game 1 of the NBA Finals. If I get a chance this weekend, I’ll write up the Mad Mix that I made for Elayne’s birthday gift.

Mad Mix, my musical alter ego, has a new post!

In case the past month had made me forget what it’s like to spend a day in the hospital with Dad, I got a reminder today. Yesterday, he called to say he was having trouble with the big toe of his left foot, that it was so painful (though not swollen) he couldn’t walk on it.

I went to his place last night, got him an icepack, and looked over the affected area. Nothing out of the ordinary, and he didn’t remember any accidents that would’ve caused the pain he was feeling.

This morning, he called bright and early (8:30am) to ask me to help get him to the hospital. We (me, him and his girlfriend) rolled into the emergency room around 9:15, before the rush, and got Dad looked over. The immediate diagnosis (from the admitting nurse) was that he was suffering from gout, possibly stemming from one of his heart medications.

The rest of the day consisted of variations on a theme, as Dad got x-rayed, blood-tested, and circulation-monitored until we finally rolled out of the place at 3:30. Everything else was negative, so the diagnosis remains gout.

Dad was freaked out by the diagnosis, since he’d never had gout before. Like I said, it was probably due to his heart med, and a slightly weird diet (he had liver twice this week). I once got nailed by gout in my ankle, but it correlated to my consuming copious amounts of red wine for several nights straight. Hey, when in Milan . . .

It was a pretty long day for me, as I hadn’t slept much the night before, and didn’t get much food in me at the hospital. After we wrapped up at the hospital and got Dad’s new prescriptions filled, I had to take care of a computer-repair/replacement job for him. This involved meeting the owner of a bait & gun shop here in NJ, where I had some good conversations about home protection.

I’ve now finished two volumes of Proust at the same hospital: the morning of Dad’s surgery, I read the last 120 pages of The Guermantes Way, and today I read the last 60 pages of The Captive. For those of you scoring at home, this means I have 900 pages left in Proust’s mega-work. Funnily enough, it feels like it’s all downhill from here, while 900 pages of just about anyone else would be insanely daunting.

If you’re interested, the up-to-date list of everydamnbook I’ve read since around 1989 is here.

I never really thought about the identity of Deep Throat, so the revelation this week that it was a disgruntled FBI exec who leaked all that info about Anthony Hopkins to Redford and Hoffman didn’t cause a lot of waves at the Virtual Memories Palace. I was more interested in the story about that dude who solved Fermat’s Theorem. The answers to either of these questions has no real effect on my life, but hey.

I was also more interested in something that grabbed Mickey Kaus’ attention: What about all those other Watergate characters who used to not-exactly-deny that they were Deep Throat? It’s kind of funny that so many other people were fingered as possible sources, but few of them came out and straightforwardly said it wasn’t them. Instead, it was as if they could cloak themselves in a little notoriety, an air of mystery about their true identities. Not content with being has-been political hacks, they had a little something to hold on to.

Till now. Many of them are dead, and the rest can now celebrate complete has-been status, soon to join Mr. Felt in a nursing home. That’s history for you.

An ongoing thing in this blog is the importance of friendship. I care a lot about my friends, even though I’ve seen a couple of decades-long friendships melt down in the past year or two.

Tonight, while I was yo-yo’ing on Rt. 287 (I felt like a vroom, okay?), I thought about the ways we stay in touch with people, and the ways we let them go. Last night, one of my friends and I talked about a mutual buddy, and how he was losing friendship points by repeatedly falling out of touch.

So, here’s the challenge: Imagine that you’re getting married, and you need to work on your guest-list. Write down the names of all the friends whom you’d invite to your wedding day. Then, next to each name, write down the last time you were in touch with that person.

Then start getting back in touch with them, starting with the one you’ve been out of touch with the longest.

Faiz K. just sent me the URL for an Ali G Translator.