“I like rock and roll, and I don’t like much else.” — John Lennon

I get bored a lot in my house on the hill, stuck up here day after day all alone like Rapunzel but with kids and shorter hair and married not just sleeping with the prince, who because of that, is not so desperate to get me down. Schopenhauer said “Life swings like a pendulum back and forth between pain and boredom.” Great.

Anyway, there are these girls in town who started a band, just like that, and they played Saturday night open mic, their first gig. Shannon, the drummer, owns the coffee shop across from my office. Julie Nipp, the woman I trade carpools with, is on vocals, and some long-haired, heavy-lidded 10-year-old (seriously) plays base — this kid oozes cool, the kind you get from 20 years playing smoky gin-soaked joints on the road. There’s a ringer on guitar who sat on the couch and played barefoot.

It’s all Kiss because Shannon wants to be Peter Criss (look at him without makeup, freaky!), which is hard on the voice, Julie says, because their songs are all written in boy keys. They opened with “I Love It Loud” and nailed “Rock and Roll All Nite” to close. Babies, grandmothers, sisters and brothers — everyone there, all walks of town. The first band scared G., so we moved to the back. Then when the Kissettes started I almost cried because I’m a wuss, and because of what I said before — art pour l’art. Also because in the middle of the room, my 7-year-old son and Julie’s 5-year-old son stood politely, hands folded in front of them, and watched her create something for everyone there … just for the sake of it. Sunday she was back in jeans and sweatshirt handing out cupcakes for her 5-year-old’s birthday party at Sunset Park.

You drive us wild, we’ll drive you crazy …

  I’m stealing this from Powell’s, who found it who knows where – bits from Paul Lynde’s delicious reign on Hollywood Squares:

Peter Marshall:  When Richard Nixon was Vice-President, he went someplace on a “good will mission,” but instead ended up being stoned and shouted at.  Where did this take place?

Paul Lynde:  Pat’s bedroom.

Peter Marshall:  If the right part comes along, will George C. Scott do a nude scene?

Paul Lynde:  You mean he doesn’t have the right part?

Peter Marshall:  In Alice in Wonderland, who kept crying I’m late, I’m late?

Paul Lynde:  Alice, and her mother is sick about it. 

Ba-dump bump, ching!

I have to go to bed, but check out Muddy Waters.  Thanks C & L. I love you, man! 

  Deborah and Jean-Jacques came over and we ate JJs famous 17-lb. burgers, my fabulous Corn, Bean and Tomato salad (courtesy Al’s BBQ book) and the best fruit this side of Tennessee.  Serious.  Nectarines, white peaches, blueberries, strawberries … these yellow things Jr. made me buy because they’re called Dinosaur Eggs.  I found a fruit place.  It’s freaking amazing. 

Anyway, we ate all that, caught up on mutual friends, lamented the shortage of Democratic contenders and the heat and the traffic to the coast, and drank some great wine.  A local pinot and a French red (I forget what), but I said, “Wow,” when I tasted the second one and Deborah said “Yeah, it’s smoky, you taste that right?  Smoke and pepper.”  And I said “Yeah.”  Then I took another drink and thought, “Hey, yeah, I do taste it!  Smoke and pepper!”  Call me oenophile.

More later …

 .. I want one of these!  A friend of mine called me on hers yesterday, walking around in the West Village with a serious old-school phone in her hand, looking either really cool or crazy.  Coming soon to the Styles section of your local paper, I bet. 

  “There were big meaty flies that summer.  Fat on leftovers, they’d been circling around soundlessly for weeks, giving everyone the creeps.”

Shoot me if the link doesn’t work … it’s probably subscription.  If it is, buy The Atlantic Fiction issue and read it.  L. Debard and Aliette

[Have a nice day today, A.!  In your new office with the sweet smell of fresh paint and all that it promises.]

… does this incredible thing where she sends people a poem every week.  On Saturdays, it used to be, then a brief hiatus, now sort of at random.  And they’re lovely; so lovely to get poems.  Here’s the last one, from Friday (or maybe Saturday, I forget now) … out of the blue.  No special meaning attached, just paying it forward.

HOUSING SHORTAGE
Naomi Replansky

I tried to live small.
I took a narrow bed.
I held my elbows to my sides.
I tried to step carefully
And to think softly
And to breathe shallowly
In my portion of air
And to disturb no one.

Yet see how I spread out and I cannot help it.
I take to myself more and more, and I take nothing
That I do not need, but my needs grow like weeds,
All over and invading; I clutter this place
With all the apparatus of living.
You stumble over it daily.

And then my lungs take their fill.
And then you gasp for air.

Excuse me for living,
But, since I am living,
Given inches, I take yards,
Taking yards, dream of miles,
And a landscape, unbounded
And vast in abandon.

You too dreaming the same.

.. Jane from Los Angeles, you’re the lucky winner of a brand-new signed first edition of the final word on political discourse! Thanks for playing kids.

Oh, and I’m out of here, so nothing new really. Read some old stuff.
Peace.

Wait, one more thing — my favorite film reviewer pens one of his genius rebuttals to an armchair critic.

Read well and thrive.

I’m too tired to remember what is fashionable to like about Hemingway, so I’ll just blurt it out: The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast. There. My favorites. The first one is sappy, and no one liked the second. So shoot me. Oh, yeah, and also his short stories … his short stories. Sigh.

Books, like songs, attach themselves to different pieces of your life. So some are hard to reread. Bittersweet. I fell in love with Hemingway in the Spring of my (first) senior year, I had unleashed myself from a horrid business curriculum and was cramming in an English degree at the last second. I was taking 20 credits a term plus working and every night in a cafe reading and writing papers, bursting with joy. It was extraordinary. And then because I was ashamed to have an English degree I spent the next 10 years in high tech. But back to Hem.

Sandra Spanier taught the class, Western Literature something. She got us all worked up about the whole lot of them: Dos Passos, Robert McAlmon, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, Hemingway, Kay Boyle. (Ms. Spanier wrote a bio of Kay Boyle, the only one I know of, and I’m grateful to both of them: Kay, for her stunning work and her fortitude and Sandra Spanier for introducing me to her.) But again, Hem … all worked up about Hemingway because why? … Hmmm, well, the way he inhabited his work for one. I loved the feeling that he was hovering over each page as I turned it. I loved how serious he took his work, right from the get go, I liked how hungry he was — women, bulls, booze. I liked that this big, macho, jocky guy sat in Parisian cafes in the afternoons and wrote novels.

I had two American Lit classes Spring term senior year — in one I was reading Ernest, and the other just gossipping about him. It was delicious. That time in my life, that is. Reading and writing in cafes. Like Hemingway’s Paris.

Looking for raw summer (ahem) romance? Harold Robbins got you bored? … try these:

Peter Cook sleeps with young people.

Football coach named “other man.”

Jailhouse romp

Scottish Swingers

Bressica?