i really love that the headline on USA Today online right now is simply: CANADIAN GOVERNMENT FALLS. awesome. when do we all move there? labatt for all!

the story is an odd one. i told roy i'd meet him across the street from beacon theater. when i got there, i heard a guy on a bullhorn saying there were tickets still available, so i went over to the box office. it turned out they were standing room tickets in the balcony, and they were fifty dollars. well, i was being a downer and i didn't want to pay fifty dollars to stand up and not see much. so, i walked around and talked to all the scalpers, telling them all i wanted two balcony tickets for forty dollars each. they all put me off, so i went back over and waited on roy.

he got there and i told him what i'd found out, and that i kind of wasn't into paying so much. so, i suggested we make another pass through the scalpers, which we did. they seemed interested in talking to us, because they were having trouble selling their tickets, but no one would give us anything for forty dollars. one guy said he would "check around," so we told him we'd be waiting and walked a little down the side street. another guy came and seemed like maybe he was going to sell us orchestra tickets for cheap ("how much can you pay? forty, that's it? no, how much more. come on."), so we decided we'd just stand there and talk, and maybe they'd eventually come down.

so after some time, suddenly there are these two guys standing in front of us. a bigger guy with grey hair (not scalpers, because these are white guys), and a skinny guy with a buzz cut and glasses. the skinny guy is clearly intoxicated to the gills.

"where you from?" he says.

"new york," i say.

"really?"

"where you from?" i ask him.

he is a very intense guy, and i was a little afraid of him. "greeew up on east ninth street, and also own a house in [something] county virginia."

"that near d.c.?"

"hell no! fuck d.c.! fuck that shit! no, it's over near [something] west virginia." he gets done spitting out all these words and then fidgets around a little.

the bigger guy leans in and says, "you guys wanna see willie nelson?" to that, roy and i don't say anything.

he takes two steps away from us and turns back around. "what part of 'do you guys want to see willie nelson?' do you not understand? do you want to see willie?"

"yeah," i say.

"well come on," and he heads down the side street towards amsterdam avenue, walking away from the crowd, going the way that leads around behind the beacon theater.

we follow him, and roy and i shrug at each other. now, i must say, the guy leading us seems like someone who would be working for willie nelson, like the roadie manager, or the guy in charge of luggage, or something like that. the skinny intense guy is a weirdo, but i could totally believe the big guy was official in some way. so, obeying the rule not to pass up anything weird just because it is weird, we follow.

we get around behind beacon theater, where there are a bunch of tour buses and a row of black, double-wide institutional doors into the building. there are cables running inside through some of the doors, and the sounds of generators, and there's a woman standing by one set of doors. our guy goes up to her and talks to her for about five seconds. they both talk, and she waves her hand around, and he heads toward the furthest set of doors. he opens it up and motions us all to come in with him.

so we walk inside the back of beacon theater and there's a concrete stairway, completely silent. roy and i walk in, followed by the weirdo, and now all four of us are inside, the door shuts, and the big guy puts a finger over his lips and gives us all a shhhhhhh.

"shit, you be quiet," the skinny weird guy says.

"sshhhh. shut up."

"no, you shut up, you don't tell me when to shut up. you did all the cocaine at once back at the bar, now i have to shut up?"

"sshhhhh. be quiet. shut up. stop talking. shut up." he waves us up the stairs and we stealthily walk up two flights, with them arguing about being quiet and who tells who to be quiet the whole time.

we get to a concrete hallway that has some desks piled in it, and there's a big red wooden double doors, and loud music is coming through it.

our guy goes up and peaks through the crack in the doors. he looks back at us, and then peaks again. skinny guy is wandering around, not standing still.

"shit!" our guy says. "shit! the guys from beacon are right there," and he points through the door. "see, the women's bathroom is right there," and he points into the wall, "and there's these two guys here. i mean, they're black guys, i think they work for beacon. listen, listen, shut up, listen! this isn't willie playing, this is ryan adams. fuck him. fuck him! we just hang out and then we can get in when willie comes on."

he goes back to peaking through the door, and roy and i look at each other and mumble, "should we go?" "yeah."

so we say, "thanks, we're going to head out," and start to walk back down the stairs. the guy turns around and says, "where the fuck are you going? stop! you can't fucking go. you're going to go tell the fucking cops where we are aren't you?"

roy takes the initiative to passify our man. "no, we appreciate everything. we're just going to go on out and walk back down the street. thanks a lot, it's fine. take care."

he yells something nasty at us as we go, but we walk down the stairs and open the doors and we're back out on amsterdam with all the tour buses lined up. we went back around to check the scalpers, but they didn't have anything for us. by this time it was a little after nine, and ryan adams was probably ending, so we decided to go get something to eat instead.

obviously at some point we figured out that that guy had nothing to do with anyone and was just sneaking into the back of beacon theater. how he knew the lady who appeared to be security, i have no idea. but, roy and i both admitted that we had, for a moment, thought our lives of music obsession were about to reward us with something, and we were going to be taken backstage by willie's tour manager, who had had too many drugs. perhaps, even by the end, we might get to go smoke a joint on willie's tour bus. ah, the thought.

i've never understood why they report how many people will be traveling over the holiday. according to triple-A, 37 million people will be traveling this week. is that a lot? not much? i have no idea.

unexplained numbers never seem like they mean much. they just make me shrug my shoulders. "a beach has seven-point-five times ten-to-the-eighteenth grains of sand." who-ho-hoouaa, dude. i dunno--how many grains of sand is it supposed to have? it's just sand.

i might have dreamt this or made it up, but i have a very vivid memory of listening to two old ladies talking, and one of them said, "did you hear, that movie made fifteen million dollars its first weekend." "oh gracious!" yet, consider, how much money is a movie supposed to make? i have no idea. it's not like she was saying, "did you hear, opal sold her bird figurines and made fifteen million dollars last weekend."

i was spending a long night in the lab tonight, and walked down to the street to get a hershey bar from the corner store. it was packed full of loud columbia students, which i didn't find very pleasant, and as soon as i paid i went straight to the door.

right outside was a guy who was in the class i did a teaching assistantship for when i first started work here. he's long graduated by now, but recognized me of course and introduced me to his friend and started telling him stories about that class.

the class was thermodynamics, which is some weird shit that i am assuming makes complete sense the seventh time you try to learn it. (being a t.a. for the class was about time four for me.) i used to spend a lot of time figuring out how to explain the material to the students, and then i taught my own section one day a week on thursdays. they would all come, and they would all be upset, and i would try to talk about thermodynamics in as plain a version of english as i could. there were about forty-five students in the class, and i always had thirty-five or forty at my recitation. they all had a sense of desperation about them.

the guy i saw tonight said, "josh, do you remember one time when there was a really long problem? i think it was on problem set four. remember how you used to write out the solutions on a sheet for us? this one you wrote out, and the solution was ten pages long. and you told us it was a ridiculous problem. do you remember that?" i didn't remember that, and i thought it was kind of weird that he did, but that's cool.

my memory of thermodynamics is this: during the semester, three of the girls in the class asked me out. it's pretty much all hazy except for that. the ten-page problem--that's gone.

25 above water is an online art sale to benefit the gulf coast after katrina and rita.


chris rubino's n.o. relief

the prints are a thousand dollars, but they are nice to look at.

for a while i have been meaning to write something about ben marcus's article in last month's harpers, which i read one night while getting drunk in a sushi bar. lately, the fiction avant-garde is pretty invisible, and there is an idea at sail that a particular writing style is the "correct" one to use--this style being a sort of transparent, cinematic style where the story's actions are presented clearly, as they happen, at a more-or-less constant velocity. jonathan franzen has made himself--or has accidentally become--the symbol of this style, in as far as it has artistic merit. and marcus uses the article to take the piss out of him for it.

this cinematic style (and also the new idea that genre writing can be considered litracha just because of its genre-ness) is postmodern, simply meaning that it is a hostile reaction to modernism. and, for reference, the pinnacle of modernist writing could be ulysses, or perhaps the waste land if you're talking about poetry. if you've read them, you know these things are big and deep, and you can kind of get as much out of them as you put in. they're complicated like people are.

but franzen's argument is that difficulty for difficulty's sake is bad. which, of course, it is. but he pisses all over his own point when he keeps talking about book sales being low, and how people just don't have time for things that require a little work to read. his idea of what people will "enjoy" reading is simplistic, because, hey, most people enjoy eating candy bars, don't they? i do.

i just read a book by elfriede jelinek, and while i couldn't pick out anything i was especially relating to in the story, i was a bit obsessed by how it was told, and how dense and big it was. in other words, i loved it, and essentially just for the style. i suspect ben marcus would have agreed with me, and jonathan franzen wouldn't have. but who knows. i do get the most out of things that require some concentration.

then there was some more stuff i was going to say about the avante-garde versus an overlooked arriere-garde, and relate that to something i read that susan sontag (oh, susan) wrote about twenty-five years ago. but the whole point of this post was that i am not going to write about any of this. see how well i did? grade me.

the boro of choice

when mia and i first moved to new york city, people would sometimes ask me why we decided to live in queens. the answer i have always given is, "because queens is the borough of choice." i never told people, however, that i got this affirmation off a hand drier in the mens' room of an irish bar on 28th avenue in astoria.

it's been a while since i've been there, but i have always meant to take a picture of the bumper sticker that did so much to make me feel good about my borough of residence. and now i see that the sticker isn't doing so well these days, although it was pristine upon my initial arrival. i'd buy a new one and put it there if i could find one. google gets me nothing.

rich offers us a yuengling, proving his aristocratic nature

hey, if you got some people coming over, i got just the thing for you--offer em a beer. say you done moved uptown, say you got a righteous new place, a place so nice you can take in the masses, the cold and thirsty of this world, and set em all down, and give em a blanket, and some soup, and some love. then you know what else? give em a beer. everyone appreciates a beer.