A Slight Delay

My wardrobe–outside work, anyway–consists mostly of blue jeans and black t-shirts. If I’m feeling particularly flashy (the nights I want to go out and paint the town beige), I might wear a shade of dark grey. The closest I’ll ever get to a runway is white-knuckling it in an idling jet plane. I like nice clothes just fine, but on my list of priorities, they generally appear several pages back.

So what in God’s name am I doing writing about fashion?

A little while back I came across Ugly NY, the website for the New York office of Ugly Talent. I think I might’ve finally found a modeling agency for the rest of us. Well, alright, maybe your burning ambition isn’t to be a model (mine’s not–great face for radio, and all that), but Ugly Talent (originating in London, with offices opened not long ago in New York)* features models that look like real people. Imagine that. (more…)

I can’t tell you exactly the first time it happened, although it would’ve been some time around 1976 and Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. The song was, and still is, “Ngiculela/Es Una Historia/I Am Singing” (a song, incidentally, I would like to have played at my funeral). It was the first, but by no means last, time that song lyrics I couldn’t understand gave me some serious goosebumps.

I can tell you the second time. It would’ve been early in 1994 or 1995, listening to World Café on NPR. Bill Bruford was the host, and he was spinning an eclectic blend of stuff. I don’t remember most of what he played that night, because one song instantly wiped out everything he played before and after: “The Truth,” by Youssou N’Dour. It’s not that I hadn’t heard N’Dour before; anybody who’s heard Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” which by now is pretty much everybody, has. But it was the first time I’d heard him like this, on his own. The vocal and the music raised goosebumps. Never mind that I didn’t understand a word of Wolof, the singer’s native language. Something there spoke to me. When I picked up the CD a short time later, I was happy to find translations of the lyrics, and happier still to see what the goosebumps were about: (more…)

One side effect of the portable MP3 player: I don’t spend nearly as much time as I used to watching television with the sound turned all the way down and the stereo on. It’s a shame, really, because you can end up with some really good, or at least pretty funny, accidental art that way, when what’s playing through the speakers accidentally syncs with what’s going on onscreen.

Case in point: I remember one night listening to Street Life, one of what seems like half a dozen Roxy Music best-ofs, while channel surfing. And it happened. Some channel was showing a speech by Louis Farrakhan, clearly getting himself into a lather over something, while Bryan Ferry and company were belting out “Do the Strand.” You can just imagine my joy when Farrakhan spake thus:

Do the strand love
When you feel love
It´s the new way
That´s why we say
Do the strand
Do it on the tables
Quaglino´s place or Mabel´s
Slow and gentle
Sentimental
All styles served here
Louis seize he prefer
Laissez-faire le strand

Maybe he was angry because he was “tired of the tango,” or “fed up with fandango.” We may never know. (more…)

One of my favorite things: stuff that happens only once, completely at random. Those snippets of found sounds, overheard dialog, or improbable phrasing are a sort of assemblage by accident. Reason and design get lost in the kind of haze that seems to be exactly why the word “ephemeral” was coined in the first place. These things only happen, it seems, when they can’t be captured, whether at the edge of hearing, from the corner of the eye, or in those fleeting moments between waking and dreaming.

And when you try to capture something like this, it ends up losing something in translation. By trying to give it form, make it last, you somehow rob it of its spirit or essence; you end up stripping it of its immediacy, and a large part of what made it special in the first place. (more…)

Last week’s assignment was to shut off the computer and get yourself to a library. I’ve had a thing for libraries for almost as long as I’ve had a thing for books, which is a long time now. I feel like a kid in a candy store… so many books, so little time. If you’re a reader, there’s no better place on Earth.

And if you’re going to write, there’s really no way to overestimate the value of reading. That may seem too obvious to even bear stating, but it’s not something to take for granted. More than once I’ve spoken to writers who claim they don’t like to read.

What the…? (more…)

Rubber ducks are a bit like Doritos. It seems you can’t have just one. I started with a single duck some years back, and what started off as something to keep in my bathroom became a minor obsession; that duck has multiplied as if by parthenogenesis, and we now have a couple dozen ducks of varying shapes and sizes, complementing a rubber duck shower curtain, plus a duckie wastebasket, toilet brush holder, and soap dispenser. As it turns out, though, there are some people for whom this is more than just a “minor” obsession. (more…)

They always say you can tell a lot by a person by going through their medicine cabinets. I say, to hell with that. Go for the junk drawer, that cornucopia of forgotten crap. Every home’s got one; a home that doesn’t have a junk drawer is like a person whose reflection you can’t see in the mirror. You’re better off getting as far away as you can, as quickly as you can, because nothing good can come of it.

The junk drawer reveals a lot about its owner(s). What do they save? How organized is it? Have the rubber bands and paperclips started to multiply like rabbits yet, making the whole thing one enormous ball of unidentifiable detritus?

Personally, I think that scientists and physicists are barking up the wrong tree with all this nonsense about string theory and black holes. Anybody that’s had a junk drawer for any length of time can tell you plenty about string theory, because every last thing they’ve thrown in that drawer since 1979 has acheived some kind of critical mass, a combination of twist ties, twine, thread, and goop from leaky bottles of unknown origin, all of which attracts dustbunnies, AA batteries, and feral cats. The best junk drawers are the ones where you can find nearly anything, because they’re the one thing in the universe from which nothing can escape.

Another favorite simple pleasure: the smell of old books, and old bookstores. It’s that peculiar bouquet of dust, mildew, and whatever else the books have picked up in their travels. It turns the book into a sensory experience, and makes it something more than just its content.

I’d be perfectly happy if someone–whoever makes Febreze, or Lysol even–would bottle that scent. I could think of worse things than the smell of an old library (though I may be in the minority there). And if someone ever managed to bottle “Eau de Benchley Roundup“… I could practically swoon just thinking of it.

For me, for whatever reason, the kitchen’s always been the focal point of “home.” And kitchen tables seem to be where everything happens. Never mind if you have a dining room; it never fails that during family gatherings and whatnot, the kitchen table’s where everybody gathers to pick, gab, and pick some more.

It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. My favorite kitchen table, in fact, was wood-grained formica surrounded by inexpensive wooden chairs (whose thin seats had the effect of amplifying my grandfather’s flatulence roughly to that of a steam whistle), and sat in my grandmother’s kitchen. The tabletop saw its share of Legos and Parcheesi games, to say nothing of countless meals; under the table was just as good, serving as hiding place and makeshift radio station (with me as the “announcer,” reading from the funnies or anything else that happened to be laying around).

On second thought, I take back that “for whatever reason” back in the first paragraph. I think that’s all the reason I need.

I keep wondering when summer will start this year. I know that on the calendar it starts on June 21, same as every other year. The problem is, that’s not when summer starts for me.

For quite a while now, I’ve always pegged the start of summer to a single auspicious occasion. The bloom of a particular flower, perhaps, or the song of some bird? Oh, no, that’s far too pedestrian. The only thing that will do (for me, anyway) is the first warm day that I hear “The Boys Are Back In Town” by Thin Lizzy on the radio.

And it has to be the radio. No CD’s or MP3’s. That would be cheating, since I own “Dedication” on disc, and ripped the song to MP3 long ago. So it has to be the radio. It’s a bit of a crap shoot–sort of like figuring out springtime by a groundhog, for instance–but when you get those goosebumps when Phil Lynott sings… That is a summer day, and a damn good one, at that.