For approximately the nine hundredth time

...in this still-young year, I am wishing that I still smoked cigarettes.

It's not a nicotine fit—it's been years since I had one, and I was never even a habitual smoker: it's just that, as the afternoon winds sullenly down into a vortex of mind-killing boredom, I'm left with nothing to do but brood.

A man who smokes can at least get up from his desk, can go for a walk, can stand out on the cold cement loading dock and watch the sky darken over the wet grey parking lot. I need to get up and walk, but I can't, because I have no vices to give me that permission.

Where you goin? Goin for a smoke.
Whatcha doin standin out here? Just came out for a cigarette.

See? Easy questions, easy answers.

But not for me.

This shouldn't make me smile

...but it does:
Man Beating Dog With Gun Shoots Himself

Score one for karma, motherfucker.

An Observation for the Day

When the fire's at its hottest—good split oak black and crackly revealing its secret red heart—the rising thermals set up a violent rushing in the flue—a sound indistinguishable from the howling of a cold wind around a cold chimney.

Potted

Hm. I'll have the reserve judgment re: the Singing Detective remake after all: director Keith Gordon is no dope, for all that he was in Jaws II...

Most interesting tidbit, though, comes from Roger Ebert as he begins his annual dispatches from Sundance—the screenplay for Gordon's film was adapted by Potter himself, as one of his last projects. It's been purposely and purposefully Americanized and updated; the writer/hero's fascination with the pop music of the 1930s has become a love for 1950s rock'n'roll. Be interesting if the film's entire cultural lens has been shifted forward: the tough-guy noir movies and crime fiction of the Fifties share a certain cultural currency with the detective pulps of the Thirties (the story's other important touchstone), but regard it from a slightly different angle—less sex, more outright desperation.

I'm optimistic, but guardedly so: though Potter himself was a teenager in the 1950s, he always identified himself with the pop culture of his parents' generation (perhaps most vividly in Pennies From Heaven, which he also adapted, not entirely successfully, for Hollywood). It will all depend on how the screenplay conveys the escapism and the nostalgia.

What is wondrous and heartening, though, is the sheer amount of work the man got done while under his "death sentence"—not only this screenplay but also the linked miniseries Karaoke and Cold Lazarus—all while caring for his wife (who was also dying of cancer) and settling his affairs, and all before early afternoon, when pain, fatigue and liquid morphine would put him away for the day.

So this could be tremendous, a genuine re-imagining of the story... or it could be the Second Coming of Cop Rock. I remain unconvinced—just as I remain unconvinced, even after watching his fine, subtle performance in Signs, that Mel Gibson can do justice to a role originated by the marvelous Bill Paterson.

It is currently warmer in Antarctica than it is here in Boston.

(Figures courtesy of a site called, belive it or not, The Weather Underground. And they say irony is dead.)

Zurich Death Trip

Learned a new word today which I probably could have done quite happily without...

ZURICH, Switzerland — A terminally-ill British man has ended his life at an "assisted suicide" clinic in Switzerland. Reginald Crew, 74, had been suffering from motor neurone disease, which he claimed had robbed him of his dignity. The former car worker flew to Zurich on Monday morning to meet representatives of Dignitas, an organisation which helps people to commit suicide.

Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland, illegal in Britain: some social critics say this is the beginning of a new industry—death tourism.

A Little Personal Business

Many thanks and much love to Apple-Pickin' Jenny and everyone else for their kindness and concern. It's been a rough couple of weeks, yeah—the world situation playing hell on nerves already shot by personal concerns and the Old Midwinter Blues, exacerbated by a case of Big Daddy Syndrome.

Do you know this one? In her column in Child magazine, Vicki Iovine quotes a proverb: "The mother of one, the mother of all." And so by its nature motherhood has been linked to all manner of social concerns.

It holds for Dads, too—but, being guys, we tend to express our compassion (as with so many other things) as anger: and when we can't target our anger effectively, we (as with so many other things) internalize it, where it eats us up. As a father, I am in the business of Making It All Better—and when I can't, it makes me a little crazy.

But this is a war. And so we keep on fighting, crazy or not.

While Awaiting the "Which Porcaro Brother Are You" Online Quiz

I've heard the song dozens of times, but never really listened to it—hardly surprising, since it's pleasantly well-crafted but disposable soft-rock, and neither invites nor rewards undue analysis—and so the line has always just sort of washed across me: As sure as Kilimanjaro rises (something something) above the Serengeti—but this morning, that (something something) bit just jumped out at me: Did he just sing "like a limbus"?

I was excited, for a moment. What an unexpected word to find an L.A. session pro using—and it's a simile within a simile, no less. Limbus: a border or a junction, a leading edge—sometimes used to describe the shadow-line where the moon's bright face turns dark, and for a moment I'm picturing this mountain above the plain like the moonrise, and the cut of light and shadow across its face...

...and then I realize he had, in fact, sung Olympus. So he was essentially describing one big mountain in terms of another big mountain, but one located someplace else. Which is probably the stupidest simile ever.

Still, I bless the rains.

My Power Is In Your Hands

Which Colossal Death Robot Are You?

Holy cow. This is bad.

Through work, I sort of vaguely know people in New Delhi—and I knew things were hairy, there, but... there are sixteen hundred people dead. Wrap your head around that number. That's one WTC tower's worth of dead folks. Dead for the want of firewood and blankets, or even (in many cases) of four solid walls and a roof.

Nobody I know is freezing to death, of course—these are IT professionals, with I'm sure, nice apartments—but I doubt any of them have central heating, either: and why should they? New Delhi, at 28° North latitude, is firmly subtropical, and usually wouldn't get much below 60F° even in the dead of its nominal winter.

So I feel for them. I mean, we're looking at 25 below zero tonight, but we live in New England fa chrissakes—we knew what we were getting into. Freaky chillsville straight outta the Himalayas—hells no; that weren't in the contract.

Al Hirschfeld, the genius of caricature, whose drawings defined an era of the New York Times, has died at the age of 99.

Find the Ninas in that one...

One more Recommended Song (with brief explanation)

We're still into the music of the post-War interregnum, before the rise of rock'n'roll and the invention of Youth Culture as we know it—the Truman years of pop. And today we're listening to "Peg o' My Heart," as performed by Jerry Murad's Harmonicats. It's a spectacularly weird recording, sonically sparse—just three harmonicas, anchored by the spectral growl of a meter-long bass model, doing a slow, ghostly dance over the old jazz standard—and still capable of raising a pleasant tingle in the nape.

It might have been just another novelty record (albeit an unfeasibly good one), and not a massive #1 hit, if not for a quirk of history: there was a strike of the musicians' union in 1947, resulting in a virtual studio lock-out. Jerry Murad, however, was able to book studio time because, by the union's definition, the harmonica was not a musical instrument! "Peg o' My Heart" was cut and released as a single at the height of the strike, when very few new records were coming out, and people bought it in droves.

Another with a strong media-tie-in: "Peg" served as the unofficial theme to Dennis Potter's television film The Singing Detective, and its tone of haunted nostalgia suited the project to a Tee.

A glance at the IMDb informs me that The Singing Detective has now been remade... with Robert Downey Jr. and Mel Gibson? With the lead character's named changed from Philip Marlowe to... Dan Dark?!?

Shriek.

One of Those Days...

...when everything hits me harder than it should, when all the wickedness and stupidity of the world feels like a personal affront, and I can't decide whether to weep or kill myself or just get drunk and punch some motherfucker in the face. Because doubtless he deserves it: just throw a rock, you'll hit somebody guilty. So better yet, throw a bunch of rocks, and throw them good and hard.

In the end, I'm just going to have to forego the man-of-constant-sorrow routine, shut up, and Do The Work. Because, really, that's all there is to be done. I don't have the luxury of cracking up, or of doing nothing.

If the world is to be saved (and this is my corner of it), that's what it will take: a multitude of people heaving a sigh, squaring their shoulders, and Doing The Work.

A Lapse In Taste

In my research for the below post, I was shocked to find that the redoubtable Roger Ebert gives Uncle Buck a paltry one-and-a-half stars. Roger mutters about the "wrong notes" that Hughes strikes, and the movie's "uncomfortable undercurrent," using words like mean-spirited and uneasy and even creepy. I'm stunned to see the Big Man so completely missing the point: the darkness of the film is what makes it a classic, instead of Yet Another Entry in the "Lovable Loser Learns To Love ... Again" subgenre.

Because the thing about Lovable Losers is that they are still, in the end, losers—and thus, creepy.

A Recommended Song (with brief explanation)

Borrowing a page from some of my esteemed fellow bloggers:

"Mr. Sandman," by the Chordettes.

Like all great pop, it sounds simple and effortless, but the fiendishly complex vocal arrangement is worthy of the Comedian Harmonists: listen to how, after the key change at 0:45, the resolution, at 1:30, modulates through keys in apparently wayward, where-the-hell-are-we-going fashion, before ending up back on the tonic—it's one of the great head-fakes of pop music. Add in an unusually clever lyric that mixes high and low culture at a stroke (rhyming Pagliacci with Liberace), just the right instrumental backing (dig those sudden Ellington-style saxophones on the middle eight), and a subtly propulsive rhythm, and it's as insistent as OCD.

Plus it was used to great effect in John Hughes's Uncle Buck, a film which has played an important role in the development of my own parenting style.

To me, my X-Men!

Jonathan Franzen Must Be Stopped!

I've hated the whingeing little bastard ever since I heard his staggeringly self-important interview on Fresh Air (ah, Terry Gross is good enough for you, but Oprah? God forbid!), but now, heav'n be praised, the forces of civilization are rallying against this threat!

...Franzen has made a separate peace with the anachronistic calling of being a serious writer in America, a lighthouse keeper who refuses to desert his post. In the personal essays that make up his first collection ... Franzen fuses the roles of fiction writer, social commentator, and concerned citizen, qualifying earlier positions and making amends for being an impetuous hothead in his Shelleyan youth. "I used to be a very angry and theory-minded person," he half-apologizes. "I used to consider it apocalyptically worrisome that Americans watch a lot of TV and don't read much Henry James.... I used to think that our American political economy was a vast cabal whose specific aim was to thwart my artistic ambitions, exterminate all that I found lovely in civilization, and also rape and murder the planet in the process." In that order of importance.

Join the Resistance! Read the rest of James Wolcott's clear-eyed, funny, and savage review at The New Republic!

(Just for Tom.)

You'll Look the Devil in the Eye and Tell Him to Begone Bye-Bye

So Long, Joe

Fuck me.

I'd been waiting for some horrible news about one of the musical heroes of my youth—with Kirsty MacColl at Christmastime 2000 and Stuart Adamson (shut up, you in the back) at Christmastime 2001—and these things always happen in threes, don't they—for weeks I've been thinking to myself, "Watch your back, Bono!"

But no. They got Joe.

Goddammit.

This was a man who loved what he did: I only saw him the once, when he stepped in to front the Pogues after it became plain that Shane MacGowan's drinking was out of control but it was too late to cancel the tour. The band's future was uncertain: this was at the Orpheum in Boston, early in the tour, and there was a buzz and a tension in the air.

Then the lights came up and there were the Pogues, and there was Joe, front and center, all pompadour and black jeans and Beatle boots, oozing rock'n'roll presence, pounding on that old Tele with IGNORE ALIEN ORDERS sticker on it: "Shane MacGowan's not here tonight," he barked, "deal with it!" And all was right with the world.

He was holding it all together, he was. Shane used to leave the stage when somebody else sang a song, but Joe was a constant presence—hanging out by the drums, shaking maraccas, all grins and good vibes, giving confidence to a band that was sadly shaken. When a broken bass-drum pedal threatened to halt the proceedings for a few minutes, the band looked uncertain—until Joe began singing a raucous old folk song a cappella, with the Pogues gradually joining in, bringing it all home as the pedal was being repaired.

He never let the energy level flag. He never let us down—us in the audience, or the guys in the band. He radiated toughness and camaraderie: that's what they call charisma, I guess.

The Last of the Rock Stars.

Radio Clash, signing off, over and out.

Better days.