Three Weeks

In 2002 I spent the summer in New York and obsessively collected a little broadsheet newsletter called Three Weeks. I mailed copies of it to everyone I knew. I was devastated when I returned to the city that fall and picked up the issue that announced their demise.

Last year I e-mailed the editor (all four contributors wrote under pseudonyms) to see where they had disappeared to. He told me they were writing for the Philadelphia Independent. That has also now disbanded, so their whereabouts are unknown. But it was pretty exciting to discover this. All the old newsletters are on the site. I wonder who they are. I love them.

Stories stories

I get conflicted about posting these, because reading over them causes a sort of ringing in my ears and acute head pain. I mean to write better articles, someday. Let's leave it at that. In the meantime:

Kids with Down syndrome.
Telenovelas.
The American Princes.

Funny funny

Even though it's been months since I saw it, there are days when this movie rears its ugly head. Especially the part when Marnie is on a date and says, "I'm the opposite of parched." And her date says, "You mean saturated?"

From the medical journal Pediatrics:, one of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Network Neurobehavioral Scale Procedures.

H. Pick up Infant (States 4 and 5)
Cuddliness
This item is a summary measure of the infant’s response to being held in alert states. There are several components that are scored in response to the infant being held in a cuddled position both horizontally against your chest and vertically on your shoulder. The infant’s resistance to cuddling should be assessed as well as the ability to relax or mold, nestle, and cling to you. Give the infant a chance to initiate cuddling (~10 seconds). Facilitate cuddling only if there is no active participation on the part of the infant or if the infant is unable to relax or mold. If the infant initiates cuddling, score 5 and above. Cuddliness should not be administered with the infant swaddled. Also, refrain from talking to the infant during the administration of this maneuver. Assign separate scores for Cuddle in Arm (horizontal) and Cuddle on Shoulder (vertical).

The M3 Summit was fun, the little I could enjoy of it. (I have a nasty deadline tomorrow and couldn't get out much.) I saw Peaches though, and Hot Chip and the Juan Maclean. I might try to see Prefuse 73 and The Rub tonight, although this article just won't be done, or become what I want it to be. The sudden invasion by an army of German boys and San Franciscans in stylish glasses and windbreakers was a welcome change from the Spring Break crowd on South Beach I have to say.

I've updated my links. If you read this and you have a blog tell me.

Holler

Did anybody else notice the Lucero t-shirt Shelby wears at the end of Hustle & Flow? That made me happy, for Little Rock, for Memphis, for the greater good.

National Magazine Awards

The Oxford American is nominated for two. Best single topic issue for the summer music issue and best feature for "Love and Death in the Cape Fear Serpentarium," by Wendy Brenner. I fact-checked that! Dubious claim to fame I suppose, but still, I'm proud.
The other finalists are here.

Moving Up

My friends are so smart!

The very clever and funny basketball blog my friend Adam W. works on with some friends, Free Darko, is the recipient of a weekly spot on McSweeney's. The blog mostly follows the varied careers of imported European players but it is also amusing to the basketball illiterate.

Volkswagen's new mascot designed and manufactured by Tim.

And Jamie E. was in my play first!

R.I.P.

Saturday on South Beach

My friend Mariah was dropping me off. She pulled the car over by my house when we both caught sight of a well-figured female in a spectacular white tennis outfit. We were both gushing over the tennis outfit, how cute it was, how we could never pull it off, when the woman and her boyfriend saw us staring at them. Embarrassed, we looked away, but the boyfriend came over to the car as I was getting out.
“How are you?” he asked, with a British accent. He had gelled hair and wore one of those shirts of light cotton embroidered with flowers, a popular item with a certain kind of man on the Beach.
I was confused.
“I haven’t seen you in such a great while!” he proclaimed, like, starry-eyed.
“I don’t think I know you,” I ventured carefully.
“Ah…” he replied, suddenly straight-faced. “I don’t know you either, but you were looking at me like we should know each other.”
“No,” I said. “We just like your girlfriend’s shorts.”
“Oh never mind,” he huffed, and walked away.

No internet in my apartment makes this project much less enjoyable. In the absence of any postings from me, please enjoy this instead. The weather in Miami right now is too lovely to even be called weather. Palms and sun during the day, a slight chill at night. It's perfect.

I went up to NYC last weekend and did very little worth reporting (although it was very nice seeing folks.) The Rauschenberg exhibit at the Met was excellent, and not even worth linking to because his work is of the sort that must only be viewed in person. Each combine is a little kit of perfect things.

What else: I have been rigorously studying every telenovela filmed in Miami and spending lots of time on sets with leading ladies in various shades of spray tan. I love novelas, and think they are underrated by English-speaking U.S. of Americans.

My editor wants to send me to Gitmo. What I can accomplish there seems almost pointless, (a complex process of signing away the right to free speech must be undertaken before visiting,) but I hope it works out.

Job

MNT is hiring a music editor. Look here. It's kind of a difficult job.

I was sitting in the part of a nightclub that's supposed to look like the interior of an airplane, drinking to Depeche Mode, when a drag queen asked me to ghostwrite his/her memoirs. I gave him/her a business card.

Yesterday I went on a little hike in the Everglades. There were piles of alligators everywhere, and ibis, great blue herons, cormorants, egrets, cranes... teeming is an understatement. My favorite bird is the anhinga. When it dives, its tail fans out under the water. Very pretty.

My boot camp story.

Learn Portuguese with Arnold

Carnival in Rio with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Rebecca sent me this. The best words to describe this are Arnold's own: "I can totally understand why Brazil is devoted to my favorite body part: the ass."

So

New Year's Eve was a surfeit of surf and turf (claws, fire-roasted animals, roe, tails, shells.) Snoop Dogg and Ludacris performed. Billy Joel stood in a corner and smoked cigarettes. The go-go dancers wore wings and the waiters dressed like tennis pros, but carried Dom Perignon instead of rackets.

Jaime Foxx shook my hand. He was covered in distracting surfaces (mirrored sunglasses, diamond earrings, polka-dotted shirt.) He tilted his head in a way that made him look like an Oscar-winning blind man for real. He said, "2006 is going to be a very good year. An excellent year."

I said: "Yeah, man." Then he was gone.

2005 Recap

There was only one new year's resolution, a tripartite goal between Lindsey, Davey, and I: read 52 books this year.

I'm afraid the finale was not a trifecta finish. One stipulation was that books over 400 pages should count as two (or was it 200 pages?), but I read so much children's literature that I don't think that's fair.

In conclusion: I definitely did not read 52 books this year. In the spirit of the Polysyllabic Spree, here's what I did read. Boys? E-mail me your final tallies and I'll post 'em. The escapist tendencies of my literary taste are a little embarassing; judge not, my friends.

By order read, re-reads annotated with an (R)

1. The Outlaw Sea, by William Langewiesche
2. I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe
3. Delta Wedding, by Eudora Welty
4. Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov
5. Edisto, by Padgett Powell
6. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
7. Cuba Diaries, by Isadora Tattlin
8. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
9. Naked, by David Sedaris
10. The Magus, by John Fowles
11. Edisto Revisited, by Padgett Powell
12. They Marched Into Sunlight, by David Maraniss
13. Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson
14. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
15. Dog of the South, by Charles Portis
16. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
17. Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
18. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowling
19. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, ibid.
20. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, ibid.
21. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (R)
22. Glamorama, by Bret Easton Ellis
23. Miami, by Joan Didion
24. Up For Grabs: A trip through time and space in the sunshine state, by John Rothchild
25. Norwood, by Charles Portis
26. A Place to Come To, by Robert Penn Warren
27. Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace
28. Lunar Park, by Bret Easton Ellis
29. A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby
30.The Elementary Particles, by Michel Houllebecq
31. The Silver Chair, by C.S. Lewis (R)
32. Bright Lights Big City, by Jay Macinerny
33. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris
34. Pastoralia, by George Saunders (R)
35. The Brief and Terrifying Reign of Phil, by George Saunders
36. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, by David Sedaris
37. Prince Caspian, C.S. Lewis (R)
38. Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh
39. Jarhead, by Anthony Swofford
40. A Room With a View, by E.M. Forster
41. Howard's End, by E.M. Forster
42. The Black Dahlia, by James Ellroy
43. Persuasion, by Jane Austin

If you wanted to count the Wolfe, Dickens, Fowles (3?), Ellis, etc. as two each then I almost made it. But then the C.S. Lewis shit would have to count as like half a book. One must keep up, if only slightly, with current events, at the sufferance of a simple resolve.

Also:
Favorite 2005 release goes to Nick Hornby for A Long Way Down, which made no critic's list but was so good.
Favorite old book: E.M. Forster ties with himself.
Favorite not-so-literary book: Snow Crash.
Genius, as usual: Oblivion.

If Penguin wasn't stupid they would sell these separately. I saw these at Paul Smith and tried to buy just one. ("On Forgetting," Freud.) If I could I would buy the whole thing.

Christmas recap

We went to New Hampshire. There we ate mucho chocolate, cookies, ham, brussel sprouts, turnips, homemade bread, biscuits, cabbage, wine, coffee, borscht, pirogies, latkes, homemade applesauce, oysters, nog, and geese. Not goose, but geese. I returned to Miami laden with chocolate and cookies, and will maintain a steady diet of chocolate and cookies until the next family gathering where my mom/aunts spend eight hours a day in the kitchen producing obscene amounts of food.

The award for best present goes to Stephen, with the Minipops book. When not engaged in a ridiculously complicated German board game called Puerto Rico we were all hunched around this book, making a list of the ones we could get. We did okay on everything but the obscure British bands, and the BBC sitcom characters, which were impossible.

The illustrator, Craig Johnson, has a very nice site featuring his account of the MTV VMAs mostly at the Setai. Don't be a jerk like me: it loads fine, it just scrolls horizontally.

Today I got a call from People's Miami correspondent. Do I want to go to Jaime Foxx's New Year's party at the Delano? Well yes, sir. I would. Quite. If I'm going to welcome 2006 with strangers, I might as well get a free dinner at the Blue Door out of it. This probably won't work out, which is why I'm writing about it now.

Philip Pullman! Kitties!

Christmas cheer from Christopher Hitchens.

A revealing mark of their insecurity is their rage when public places are not annually given over to religious symbolism, and now, their fresh rage when palaces of private consumption do not follow suit...But there are millions of well-appointed buildings all across the United States, most of them tax-exempt and some of them receiving state subventions, where anyone can go at any time and celebrate miraculous births and pregnant virgins all day and all night if they so desire. These places are known as "churches," and they can also force passersby to look at the displays and billboards they erect and to give ear to the bells that they ring. In addition, they can count on numberless radio and TV stations to beam their stuff all through the ether. If this is not sufficient, then god damn them. God damn them everyone.