- Flo Rida - Run
- Superchunk - This Summer
- Nicki Minaj - Starships (I hope not)
And there's Girls, which I actually pretty much love, not because it's particularly profound (it's not) nor because its characters are likeable (they're not, although that seems to be the point), but because it's such a forthright presentation of scuzziness. Not to be confused with grittiness -- The Wire this show ain't, not least of all 'cuz there are no black people on it. No, the thing it's good at depicting is a kind of naive, lower-middle-class bohemianism, like the way Martin Amis behaves in The Rachel Papers. I didn't even know I was supposed to do this shit when I was 22: Fuss over obscure, unlistenable rock bands; drink to excess in vile East Williamsburg bars; dress like a birthday-party clown. It's what I aspire to now, mind you, but it may be too late: I'm a dude, thirty years old, and not living off my parents any more (although they did pay for my liberal arts degree).
Tattoos could be a summer jam. Point of fact: My sister just got one, facilitated by yours truly -- a graduation present of sorts, in lieu of luggage or, I don't know, good advice. I think it was a good move on her part, not least of all because of the design she chose: No Chinese character ankle-tat for her, she got the fuckin' golden ratio tattooed on her ribcage. Minus that indulgent spiral; very simple, like a Mondrian waiting to be colored in. The guy at Saved -- right off the Metropolitan Ave. stop -- did a thing where he transferred the printout she gave him onto a sort of tracing paper and then drew over it. The whole process took about 20 minutes, although the pamphlet they gave her suggested that the thing would crust up suddenly a few days down the road. She made me swear over celebratory pints at Union Pool that I'd get one, too. The difficulty is, of course, in the choosing. I won't lie, I've often thought about getting the venerable GNU gnu stenciled onto one of my triceps. I've been a devotee for a decade or more, so I think it passes the morning-after test. My only reservation is that it looks awfully blissed out -- stoned, even. It could attract, you know, the wrong kind of attention.
I will keep you all posted.
Maggie and Cliff got married! I'm writing to you still not fully recovered from the red-eye we took back from San Francisco. They'd arranged to have their wedding in wine country, Paso Robles to be exact, and Maggie'd told us she'd rented a big cottage to house all of us commuting from parts east. On Thursday morning, Tom and Colleen and Nina and I all hopped the same plane to San Francisco, where we met up with old Greg and rented an enormous Jeep Liberty to take us the rest of the way to Paso Robles. On the journey, we taught him about The Motto and argued about whether George R. R. Martin's writer's block on "Book 5" was cynically aligned with the HBO show's debut. As we traveled south and east, stopping at an In & Out Burger for a fully unncessary and totally non-vegetarian dinner, from Redwood City out towards Salinas and beyond, the road became straighter and the scenery got flatter. We found ourselves in garlic country, and stopped at a road-side produce stand for various pungent foodstuffs: Among other items, a half-gallon jar of garlic salsa and several individual scoops of garlic-flavored ice cream (vanilla-and-garlic; chocolate-and-garlic).
It was dark when we finally got to the house in Paso Robles, but people were still celebrating inside. The ranch house that Maggie'd rented turned out to be enormous -- nine bedrooms and a "media room" that slept three -- plus satellite cabins. There was a pool; tennis courts; basket hoops; pens with horses in them for some reason. Maggie showed us to our room, which was right off the kitchen and decorated with a funny "safari" motif. We deposited our bags and homphed barbecue food, whooping as further stragglers and long lost friends arrived.
On Friday morning, Tom and Colleen and KT's man-friend Chris and I drove out to Von's to pick up groceries and cooking things. We also picked up a copy of what I think was a local-ish alt-weekly, the San Luis Obispo New Times, which included an utterly risible live music review, excerpted below:
I wasn’t there on Aug. 16, 1974, when the Ramones first played CBGBs, but I know what it probably felt like, because I am here, in the Z Club, on Friday, June 1, to see Han Solo’s Baby, American Dirt, and Magazine Dirty.Later, Jay and Emma drove us out to San Simeon to visit the Hearst Castle historic site. The Castle was pretty much the vacation home of William Randolph Hearst, consummate robber baron and yellow journalist, now maintained by the California parks department. Wine country is nuts, babies! Now that we could see the landscape in daylight, the full strangeness of it became clear: We drove over and between huge rolling yellow hills, like grassy sand dunes, broken in spots by a field of grapes or a patch of scrubby green stuff or an abandoned bit of farm equipment. Hearst Castle itself is on top of one of these hills, off a highway out by the coast. It's not immediately visible from the road, and the place where you park your car is not quite the castle, it's the visitor center, where you can buy five-dollar bottles of water and various Hearst tchotchkies (mugs, tiny license plates, top hats), and where you put yourself on a schedule to ride a bus up to the actual castle. The bus ride took about fifteen minutes, the bus chugging up a winding, tree-lined path through the hills while Alex Trebek (!) provided a heavily-expurgated family history of the Hearsts and gave a rationale for the building of the castle.
The castle itself reminded me a bit of Ricoleta Cemetery, in terms of its opulence and architecture. The tour we'd signed up for ("Grand Rooms") took us through the ground floor of the main building on the castle grounds, which included a sitting room, a dining room, a billiards room, a breakfast nook, and a screening room. Each of these was packed with Hearst's acquisitions: Statues, paintings, tapestries, tables, and wood paneling, from an assortment of centuries, countries of origin, and artistic traditions. The tour guide took a weirdly populist-folksy tack on explaining what we saw:
This was Hearst's living room. I've got a living room in my house, too. The only difference is that Hearst had a 16th-century tapestry hanging in his.but that seemed to be a dodge for a shameful and self-evident truth: Material goods cannot save you from death, and it is a mistake to hoard them. Nonetheless, we had a fun silly time, especially after the tour, when we had some opportunity to wander the grounds and gawk at the "Neptune pool" and the various porn-y marble statues (naked muscle-wrestlers, the three graces sucking face).
On the way back from the castle, we parked at a rest stop built out with a wooden terrace of sorts from which you could observe a beach's worth of Elephant seals, prone and sunning themselves, and as a pamphlet helpfully informed us, undergoing a scheduled "catastrophic molt," which meant losing, like, all of their skin at once. ("Are these elephant seals sick or dying? No.") They flopped up and down the beach, some snuggled up to each other, others looking to spar, but mostly just lying prone and gray-brown, like hairballs horked up by an outsize cat. Occasionally one would "flip" sand up onto itself with its flippers.
We had to deposit Emma at the wedding venue, a vineyard called Vina Robles, so that she could rehearse some key components of the ceremony, and since we arrived early, we decided to do a wine tasting. I could see why they'd chosen that place to get married -- the building had really high ceilings with tall windows that filled the rooms with hazy afternoon sunlight. It was like a wine church. The "tasting associate" was friendly and talked a good game about what we were drinking -- although my palate is so suggestible that she could've told me pretty much anything. I certainly can't tell the difference between "notes of cherry" and "notes of strawberry." But the wines were tasty enough that we bought a couple of bottles (Jay and Emma did, too), along with a tin of the vineyard's "signature" spicy peanuts. (Which were speedily devoured during a late-night game of Werewolf.) Later in the evening, a few of the already-married gentlemen in our number took Cliff into the garage to drunkenly impart advice on marriage. I crashed their party and tried my best to contribute.
The morning of the wedding, Maggie and Cliff disappeared to perform some secret logistics. We members of the house resolved to suck the premises dry: After a marathon breakfast-cooking orchestrated by Chris (he's worked as a restaurant chef), we swam in the pool for a while drinking Bud Light. Nina rode the Water Taxi. Then she became the Water Taxi and carried me around. We went on a wine-tasting tour in the afternoon. The first place we went was Tobin James Cellars, named, of course, after the killer in the Saw movies. It was a very different scene from Vina Robles: The vineyard's tasting room was a repurposed barn, decked out with bits of ranch kitsch and about a hundred mirrors in the shape of the vineyard logo, a star with a spiral in the center which I could swear I've seen on the awning of a tanning salon. It looked like a maiden aunt's patio. And, because their tastings were free, it was packed with sandaled, fanny-packed people. Their wines were pretty sugary -- or, in California wine parlance, "fruit forward" -- but not undrinkable, with the exception of one, the Petite Sirah, which the menu described as a "dark, inky fruit bomb." It was inky, to be sure -- like a Bic pen. It was also the only one thus far that we spat out. The next vineyard we went to was the Rockin' R. They were obviously a smaller operation, their tasting setup pretty much just a picnic table out front. The woman who pitched us wine there was euphemistic about "the James gang." "They get a lot of... first-time wine buyers," she said. Rockin' R's wines were pretty fruit foward, too, though.
We were still tipsy by the time the trolley came to take us to Vina Robles. Nina and I rode in the unenclosed rear section, which treated us to the warmth of the late afternoon sun but also a frenzy of wind and dust that chapped our lips something fierce as the trolley careened up and down the sloping hills towards the vineyard. The wedding proper was actually outside on the warm flagstones of the vineyard's back patio. Presided over by their friend Jeremy (whose wedding Maggie'd officiated some years prior), the ceremony included a reading from the Massachusetts court ruling on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage (!). Maggie and Cliff's vows were characteristically funny and beyond sweet: There was mutual compromise over adjusting the thermostat, and they'd had plotted out a symbolic breaking-of-the-glass ritual that included sweeping up the shards to appease Cliff's neat-freak tendencies. It made me tear up, it did. Then it was into the vineyard's cavernous dining room for homphing and dancing. Maggie and Cliff had seated me and Nina directly across from them -- I tried to be extra funny, but all I felt like doing was to gawp and smile at them. Maggie's old teaching buddy Corey did something heroic on the dance floor. And then it was time for all of us to dance, which we did, stuffed as we were with purple potatoes and risotto. Those of us wearing ties (I'd borrowed one last-second from Ted) removed them and re-tied them around our foreheads (it's a summer jam). Cliff sang and performed The Humpty Dance.
We woke up stiff and headached on Sunday morning to the sound of the caterers preparing a brunch outside our room. After inhaling the breakfast burritos they provided, we said our goodbyes to everyone (the newly-minted Maraschinos were departing to Fiji!) and piled back into the Jeep Liberty. We drove back out to the coast and made a pit stop in San Simeon to say peace to the elephant seals (they flipped sand and belched) before embarking on our journey to the north via the storied Pacific Coast Highway. Oh, man. That drive is hard to describe. The nearest I can get it is that it's like being on another planet: The sheer red cliffs on one side, the sheer drop-off into the Pacific on the other; the blue sky, the wildflowers growing in a dozen different colors all around the road. And it went on and one, babies, like a dream. We stopped at a rest stop to watch surfers contending with the waves several hundred feet below, and I fed Red Vines to a shy contingent of pygmy squirrels. We drove on and on, eventually stopping for food at Big Sur Coast, a crunchy art gallery and café built into the side of a cliff. They were exhibiting a selection of weird little bronze frog sculptures by a guy who called himself Frogman. The frogs' little black hands struck me as being somehow sexual. I don't know.
The next place we stopped was a marijuana dispensary right off the highway a little bit north of Santa Cruz, where we were hoping to use the bathroom. The dispensary was closed, and the bathroom was indicated by a series of rude signs: "Don't ask where the bathroom is. If you can't read the signs, go back to kindergarten!" The "bathroom" ended up being a port-a-potty, and Colleen balked when she opened the door. "That is the most digusting port-a-potty I've ever seen," she said. We got to San Francisco at twilight, and dropped Greg off in the Mission before stopping for burritos at El Farolito. I made sure to charge all my electronic toys at SFO before getting on the plane, but as soon as we boarded I got so tired that even the fact that Nina and I had non-negotiable front-row seats to the in-flight screening of John Carter couldn't keep me awake. Tom kept himself awake enough to learn something about Tharks, which he told me when we got off the plane in the morning:
Tharks did not start this war, but they will end it!
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