High row the boatmen, motherfuckers

Shit like this is why I live in LA. "Bernstein, Copland, Gershwin" at the Hollywood Bowl.

One of my favorite conductors and my all-time favorite baritone performing music from my favorite goddamned musical and one of my favorite song cycles (sung by the aforementioned awesome baritone). Oh, and Gore Vidal is reading the narration for Lincoln Portrait.

For $16 a ticket. I bought two.

Life is good.

This post brought to you by the letter "S"

For "sucker."

From the conclusion of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino:

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

I put this here so I'd see it every motherfucking day until I post again, and after that I'm thinking about having it tattooed on my body. Maybe backwards and on my forehead, so that it's staring me in the mirror every morning and night when I brush my teeth and put product in my hair.

I've spent a lot of time letting the former type of person sneak into my life, and have let at least a couple of the latter slip through my fingers. I don't think I throw myself into the inferno... but you wouldn't know it by some of the choices I've made recently. It's time for me to decide, through my actions, what kind of person I want to be, and quit fucking around with this whole "life" thing.

No, I'm not explaining.

Some attention-whoring: my contributions to the aforementioned limerick thread.

"Plus, I slept with your sister. M'kay?"

Famous poems rewritten as limericks. Arguably one of the best MetaFilter threads I've ever seen.

Five

So, today is the fifth anniversary of the bone (which makes this blog exactly thirty years younger than Joe from American Leftist... happy birthday, by the way!).

Wow.

There isn't a single fucking thing in my life that is the same as it was back then.

I'm putting the band back together starting up the blog again. I think. The Democratic Congress, rather than invigorating my interest in politics, has actually stunted it... I had a bad feeling that they were going to be largely ineffective, but I was dying to be proved (proven? whatever) wrong on that point. Longtime readers will recall that there was a time when I was doing quite a bit of political writing, but I've pulled away from that since moving to California.

This site will become something more personal over the next few weeks and months, I'm sure. It may or may not be interesting to people that don't know me (and might bore not a few of those folks as well), but I'm thinking about turning it into kind of an .mp3 blog as well, so that might be an incentive for people to read this site. I've always played things close to the vest when writing about certain topics (work and relationships, primarily) , and so there will undoubtedly be posts that are somewhat cryptic. Sorry about that. Hopefully the music I choose will keep shit from being too boring.

Thanks for reading. I'll do my level best to write more frequently for the people that have stuck around.

No, I haven't read the Harry Potter books. Yes, I found these funny regardless.


"Do you love Harry Potter, but think you're too old and too awesome to be seen reading the books? We have the solution, my friend. Print these out and you can safely read your Potter in front of all those ex Navy SEALS at the local strip club."

"Purely in the interests of science, I have replaced the word 'wand' with 'wang' in the first Harry Potter book..."