the one where i talk about coke cans and barack obama.

i came to a couple of realizations today, and i wanted to share a third idea:

jeter. i prefer drinking coke out the can rather than plastic bottle (nothing beats the glass bottle, but that's a red herring right now). the reason is that the coke tastes colder, and tastes colder longer, out the can. i dont know if the fact that metal gets cold whereas plastic does not necessarily makes the coke inside the can colder and keeps it that way longer (id assume so, but im no rocket scientist; maybe the plastic insulates the coke whereas the metal does not). but i know that the can feels colder to the touch when i take it out the refridgerator compared to taking the bottle out for a spin. and once that feeling instantly travels up my arm to my brain, ball game's over man. my brain's gonna make that coke taste cold. (sometimes i even press the can against my forehead, to play up this effect; it's groovy).

when i take a plastic coke bottle out the fridge, i cant tell what temerature the coke inside is. if this is in a store, i have to feel other, metal products inside the fridge to know that the fridge is indeed cooling everything, and that the coke inside the bottle is prolly cold. it's a real crapshoot, lemme tell ya.

i dont want to play a guessing game. i want a sweet-tasting, tooth-rotting caffeine infusion. gimme the can, stan.

cano. using the edit html function when composing a blog post, rather than the compose function, is prolly analogous to driving with stick shift compared to driving with an automatic transmission. i say 'prolly' because i cant drive stick. but people who do claim it gives them 'more control' over the car and whathaveyou. it seems to me this is similar to the straight html function.

giambi. last wednesday, after the benefit concert which i already ripped apart here, i was talking politics with my colleague's sister. anyway, we were talking about stars of the democratic party, and she mentioned, as is inevitable in such talks, barack obama. my response was: 'barack obama is like snap bracelets.' i feel the need to mention it here because i just saw that she used it as her 'headline' on myspace, and i too would like to preserve it for posterity.

what i meant is that he's a fad. im sure he's classy enough, and hopefully he'll prove himself an enduring entity, and rise up the ranks, as the nation could always use another black leader. (and i would really like to see a black president, for many reasons.) but for now, barack is like snap bracelets. no one had heard of them or knew where they came from, then bam! - everyone had them, and thought they were the bomb. then they disappeared.

no one knew about obama and then he got some pub during the convention, he seemed classy, then bam. it all happened so fast. i doubt that barack will disappear - i hope he does not - but i think we need to give him a little more time to make his mark, before we annoint him our savior.

andre agassi has had the most odyssean career of any athlete in my lifetime.

he's finally back in ithaca, taking on one suitor at a time.
he's the effing man.

dre's next match is against marcos baghdatis, who's from - fittingly - cyprus.

mailing down the house.

last wednesday night, i went to a benefit concert for the 826 writing labs collective, which was founded by dave eggers, who hosted this b.s., i mean b.c.

the whole thing looked to be very promising, what with the likes of j-stew, sufjan stevens, and david byrne holding court.

but to me, the artists ended up mailing in their performances. aside from some other meaningless tripe perpetrated by eggers and his cronies, j-stew told a few timely jokes, but mostly read from the paperback version of america, even cracking wise about how the new edition is just an opportunistic retread; sufjan played some of his best songs, but hardly in a 'rocking' or even jazzing manner: more like he was afraid of his own spotlight-induced shadow; and when his time came, david byrne got up and threw a bucket of lukewarm water on the audience by immediately announcing that he was 'going to do a country set.'

now, i'll admit that my initial reaction - 'i wouldnt go to a yankee game to watch derek jeter dribble a basketball' - though clever, could have ended up being off base (im punny). byrne could have ended up rock-twanging out, blowing us all away with new, alt.country versions of some of his most-liked songs. after all, it would be kind of cool to see jeet do cartwheels around the bases for a homerun trot, or make his throws to first underhand. nothing wrong with spicing up the same old same old.

but byrne didn't spice anything up. he watered it down. he first played two country songs that were good songs, but which certainly didn't require the founder of talking heads to do them justice (think derek jeter pitching batting practice). then he played two lesser-known heads songs - the big country, creatures of love - in the same country vein (think jeet jogging to first after hitting it in the infield).

now, im not saying he should have played burning down the house (which im not even crazy about at this pt) or once in a lifetime or even psyhco killer. i can understand byrne not wanting to play the most popular heads songs, whose first bars might well make him nauseous. but c'mon. suck it up and gimme some this must be the place (naive melody) or crosseyed and painless. gimme something to which you know i stand a good chance of mouthing along. gimme that sweet, sweet two-way street concert dynamic, not the lecture hall laboriousness.

there's no way david byrne could have reasonably thought that most of the people who were there to see him did not want to hear some classic talking heads songs. no way. i mean, he should have at least played one heads classic, out of the four songs he played.

i know musicians get tired of being painted into their own hit-song corners. they want to show they can do more than write those catchy top-forty nuggets, both to the audience and to themselves. they want to show that they have grown as artists. and i understand that.

so do that for part of your set, and for the rest of the set, give us what you know we came to see. grow on your own time, when it's not on my dollar (btw, my ticket cost over $50, and yet eggers still had the audacity to pass a hat around midway through the concert, asking for donations; but im not gonna go off about that here).

so you dont like playing psycho killer anymore. well guess what? i dont like going to work sometimes either! and the dude who runs the walk-in closet breakfast cart on my corner - i dont think he likes waking up every morning at 4 am just to ensure that shmucks like me can have their bagel and coffee. and i dont think the dudes who clean the toilets in my office building run up and down the stairwells jumping for joy. but you know what? they do it. you could be a lot worse off then having to once again perfrom swamp for adoring fans who worship you. you, david byrne.

am i wrong? is that too much to ask? i know creativity makes the performers' job different - inherently makes them have to tweak their performances (their work) now and then - but they still should show up and do their job. and as i saw it, byrne mailed his work in that night.

as an encore, stevens joined byrne to sing lefty frizzell's saginaw michigan. it was a fitting cap on the night, because this great pair of singer-songwriters sang a song neither of them wrote, and together they enjoyed all the chemistry of an easy-bake oven cooking a lame-ass brownie with a two-watt lightbulb.

rock 'n roll, meet oil 'n water

to add insult - but also corroboration - to injury, when i was deciding what link i would use to reference david byrne (sometimes i feel like i rely on wikipedia too much for this), i came upon his website journal, in which he talked about the benefit himself:

Benefits are funny things. Often the public pays exaggerated ticket price to see “watered down” versions of the musical acts — most times I myself play a few songs on acoustic guitar, as do many of the others. Now, watered down it maybe be, but sometimes the “unplugged” version is more moving and emotionally involving that the more fully arranged version — well, sometimes. When that happens it’s not a bait and switch deal.

i mean, you gotta love that. i didn't make that up (just click on the link), as i did with some of the bush story in july. byrne himself actually acknowldges his less than stellar performance, even using the words 'watered down', not to mention 'exaggerated ticket price'! and i also love the 'well, sometimes' part. he might as well have have included the ;) or :p emoticons. byrne, i consider myself byrned. indeed, bait and switched.

i still think david byrne is a god, and im glad i can cross him off my have-to-see list. but he's enjoying a perpetual sew-his-oats sabbath, and i didnt want to subsidize it to the tune of 50 ducats.

The State: Taco Mail

i wanted some talking heads; i got some tacos.

ramblin', man.

have you ever been in a store, or at someone’s house, and made a call with your cell phone, and the phone in the place you were started ringing coincidentally? that just happened to me, and i wondered if i had somehow divined the number of the store i was in and intuitively called it. all of a sudden, i felt like this omniscient being. i felt like god.

then my verizon service cut out and i was humbled.

colby's law. or the spirits of don locke.

(while listening to simple twist of fate. holy shit can bro write a song.)

you may remember my treatise on my spirits. if you dont, god help you.

two weekends ago, as predicted in my last post, i went down to baltimore to attend stanton and carolina's wedding.

firstly, let me say that this was a great wedkend (wedding whose events take the whole weekend; you heard it here first) all around. everything and everyone was really elegant and nice, and it all went off without any major hitches. i was the best man, and even the spirits gave me a reprieve while i executed my best man duties. for example, during the ceremony i was responsible for holding the rings in my pocket, then producing them when called upon, placing them on a silver plate the priest was holding, then holding said plate while the father sprinkled holy water on the rings, then handing the plate back to him. not only was i able to extricate the wedding bands in a timely manner without having to take my pants off, and to drop them on the silver without having them clink and roll around on the plate like spinning pennies, but i didn't even come close to fumbling either hand-off with the man of cloth. so yeah, the spirits gave me a break, until something else needed extrication - me!

saturday night/early sunday morning. i had come back to my hotel room to chill with some of the other wedding guests. at around 1.30 am, we were going to go down to the hotel bar to chill in a different locale and whathaveyou; everyone left ahead of me, while i stayed back to change. thing was, when i myself soon tried to open the room door to leave, i found that while the handle turned, the bolt didn't move, and the door wouldn't open.

at first, this wasn't too worrisome. the hotel uses that keycard system, where you use a faux-credit card to open your door instead of a key; in this hotel you also needed it to press your floor's button once you were in the elevator. and the whole wedkend, this thing had been giving me fits. it usually took three times to get my floor lit up in the vator, and it customarily took five or six tries to get into my room, and counter-intuitively, a few times to open my door from within my room (i know, it makes little sense; why would opening the door from within, where the card wasn't nec., be problematic? yet it was.)

so late sat., as i was about to leave my room to join my friends at the bar, the door wouldn't open, yet again. no worries, i kept at it. fifth attempt, diced. whatevs, it'll give eventually. tenth attempt, diced.

push the door in and try again. diced. pull out and try. diced. the door was just not opening. in utter disbelief, i called the front desk:

'um, yeah, hi. i'm locked in my room.'

'do you need to come get an extra card?'

'no, im locked in the freaking room.'

'you're locked in the room?'

'HELP!'

so the proverbial 'they' sent someone up with a card. he couldn't open it. then they sent an 'engineer.' he didn't fare any better.

i, fueled by incredulity and moet chandon, called the front desk again and bitched them out, calling for a refund:

'i didn't come here to be imprisoned! you dont even have hbo!'

then, fueled by moet, i fell asleep. i woke up around eight, to the telephone. it was a woman at the front desk, who told me that they were comping one night of my two-night stay, as a reparation, and also that they had stopped trying to get me out last night when they assumed i had dozed off. i was glad to hear about the comp, and still very tired, so i went back to sleep.

then, around nine, i woke up to the sound of a knock on my door. i assumed it was the team of engineers. but it was stanton (he and carolina spent their first night of marriage in the hotel, on my floor). i said:

'hey man! how's married life?'

'good, good, what's goin' on?'

'im locked in my room.'

he didn't believe me - why would he? - so i passed him my card under the door, and when he couldn't open the door, he believed me. i went back to sleep.

anyway, to make a long story shorter, i next woke up round ten, to the sound of stanton, his father, his father's best friend, and a team of hotel people at the door. they all told me to stand away from the door, while they took a hatchet to it, which was the only way of removing the metal card-lockbox, which was apparently not affixed with simple nuts and bolts.



it was straight out of the shining, kind of. and the tremendous pounding did not help my not-huge-but-not-tiny headache.

when the door was finally nothing more than a loose framework of splintered wood, everyone pushed through and profusely apologized to me, and stanton told me he had, in the interim, gotten both of my nights comped. apparently, after i originally told him i was locked in, he went straight to the front desk and read them the riot act. at first, the managment told him they'd only comp one night b/c the first one-friday night-had been smooth, but stanton convinced them that this was not the point. anyway, the hotel books any weekend night reservation as a minimum two-night stay, so their own logic bit them in the ass.

during the sunday brunch that stanton's parents held at their house, my little adventure was a main conversation. those who didn't previously know me found the story remarkable. those who did know me agreed it could only happen to me.

one of stanton's main pts of why the whole thing was so egregious was that the hotel had let me stay in the prison room over the night without fixing the problem, because, as they said, i had fallen asleep, and more or less consented that they could try again in the morning. stanton brought up the fact that it shouldn't have even been my choice, b/c if god forbid a fire had broken out in the hotel, i'd be toast (i was on the tenth fl., btw, with no fire escape).

stanton opined that if i indeed had become toast, he would have owned the hotel by that very morning, and would have sparked a national law that would require that hotels rectify spontaneous prison rooms without delay, no matter what time of night, nor what the guest says. the law would have been colby's law, much like jude law.

everyone also agreed the spirits had been at work, slithering through the keyhole and lock mechanisms themselves (rather than simply holding the door closed). but this time, as jordan might have said, the spirits clumsily helped me, rather than harmed me.

coupla early wedding pics:

nora and i do what we do best together - yap, while behind us, stanton and carolina do what they do best togther - be all in love with each other and junk.

'im unbearably classy, and you know it.'

im off to go play a part in these two cats getting hitched.

the best part, man.

new kids on the block had a bunch of hits; joe lieberman makes me sick.

joe lieberman has been a democratic senator from connecticut for 18 years. then last night, largely as a result of his pro-iraq war stance and perceived closeness with dubya, he lost the connecticut democatic primary for the nomination to his own seat to political neophyte ned lamont.

but liebs has decided to run in the general election, as an independent.

according to the times, Mr. Lieberman said Tuesday night that he was staying in the race because Mr. Lamont had run a primary campaign of “insults” and “partisan polarizing” that relentlessly blamed him for President Bush’s wartime policies, which the senator has supported and defended but also criticized at various points.

hey, joe - asshole - guess what? it doesnt matter why you lost, and it especially doesnt matter why you think you lost. the point is, the connecticut people of the party that's given you backing for 18 years decided they dont want you anymore. the whole pt of representative gov't is that honey, it aint your decision when you should take a hike; it's theirs.

it aint easy to beat an incumbent in a primary. when it happens, you know that dude's time has passed. liebs continuing to run is an insult to the intelligence of connecticut, and national, voting democrats.

it's a real shame, too. in the 2000 presidential election, lieberman was a great asset to gore, and i for one was really happy and impressed to see that, despite that ticket "losing," americans did not seem to shy away from voting an orthodox jew into the executive branch. so up until last night, i was still a fan.

but no longer. last night lieberman announced his plan to follow in the hallowed footsteps of famous, sore sport spoilers like jacob javits and ralph nader, both of whom tainted great records of public service by helping to ensure that wicked republicans would assume high offices (al d'amato in '80 and bush in '00, respectively), by splitting the vote against them.

last night, in his ass-backwards 'concession speech,' lieberman tried to stoke his hapless campaign workers for the long slog ahead by saying he was a sports fan, and tendering this analogy: “As I see it, in this campaign, we’ve just finished the first half, and the Lamont team is ahead, but in the second half, our team, Team Connecticut, is going to surge forward to victory in November.”

this, despite that, according to the same times article, A survey of Democratic primary voters leaving polling places in Connecticut, conducted by The New York Times and CBS News, found little support for the [independent run] idea. Sixty-one percent of respondents said Mr. Lieberman should not run as an independent in November, including 21 percent of Mr. Lieberman’s supporters, while 39 percent of all respondents said he should.

hey, bastard, i got a sports analogy for you. spring training's over, and your team just cut you. clear out your locker, and try the pink slip on.

dans la bibliothèque.

And if you're just looking to stay cool, the library is encouraging residents to visit any one of its 60 branches.

i read that on the ny1 website yesterday. thinking of the library always reminds me of my dad, because he's a bookworm who's always reading a new library book, rarely a new new book - something ive long admired about him.

so at the invitation of the public library, i decided to take refuge from the heat and pay homage to my dad at the same time by going to our old neighborhood's local branch on 23rd street, epiphany.

when i stepped inside, the place was packed. but closer inspection revealed that the majority of the people there had no interest in serious browsing or reading - they were just there to hang out. most of the tables were filled, but mostly with people who were not reading.

i went and found ellison's invisible man on the shelves, since it's my dad's favorite book, and started looking for a seat myself.

while i was making the rounds, i noticed an old, neatly-dressed man teetering on the perimeter of the tables, looking for a seat himself. i asked him if i could help him find a place to sit down.

he smiled warmly at me, and this time i thought of my grandfather. 'yes, thank you. i haven't seen the library so filled with people in ages,' he said.

'no one ever comes here anymore.'