I Am Not A Gun: 2008.03

My M.O.

[Note: I literally do not remember posting this. No more drunk blogging Liam!]

I found this great quote by Ruth Gordon (aka Maude in Harold and Maude) describing the time, during Prohibition, when the expression “doing the town” meant something. I can't describe how much I love identifying with a person or a time years, decades, or centuries later. She said the following is a typical itinerary for dinner to dawn in the 1920s:

"For a really swell night out in the Twenties you’d probably start out at an elegant place like the Crystal Room in the old Ritz-Carlton on Madison Avenue. Oh, did they have wonderful food there. You ordered a la carte of course. Anything you wanted. You’d start off with the oysters, then you’d have a lovely soup with croutons on the side. Then, if you were truly eleganza you’d have some fish, and then you’d have the game, if it was in season. (That was Fanny Brice’s great restaurant line—“Give me anything, as long as it’s out of season.”) Or you’d have the gigot—which was a big thing all by itself. Nobody thought too much about salad. Salad, in those days, was Lobster Salad or Chicken Salad. And the desserts were paradise—Baked Alaska and profiteroles! Nobody cared about diets. Everybody ate chocolates and cakes and whipped cream. Adele Astaire [sister of Fred], a friend of mine, had a chocolate soda every day of her life, as I did for the most part, and once I said to her, “Why don’t we ever get fat?” She said, “We are just fortunate that we are blessed with poor assimilation.” I don’t know what she meant by that, but it’s true that we ate anything that we wanted to and we certainly did not get fat.

After a lovely late dinner at the Crystal Room you’d go over to Harry Richmond’s Wigwam Club. Of course it was during Prohibition so you’d have to order something like Chicken à la King just to hold the table, but actually you were there just to have more illegal drinks. Depending on how you felt at two or three in the morning, you’d make your way up to Harlem and go to Small’s Paradise or The Savoy to hear the great bands. Then you might have a snack at one of the little Harlem bistros where you would eat what we now identify as “soul food.” At seven or eight in the morning you’d arrive at Reuben’s, which was on Fifty-eighth Street between Fifth and Madison, where you would have breakfast. And everybody who was anybody was always there.

Going out in the Twenties was so glamorous, so dazzling. Everybody was beautiful and everybody was sexy and nobody was economical. If you weren’t glamorous and beautiful you stayed home. But the whole idea was to have money, to be striking. Nobody was concerned about being cultured or being talented."

iMarchingBand

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

iTunes 26 (set for release in November 2017) will include many new features including one we at Apple are especially excited about: iMarchingBand (accessed by going to File -> Export as... -> Marching Band Halftime Show). The iMarchingBand function (using a suite of sophisticated algorithms) converts any song in your library into a marching band half time show, complete with simulated choreography! Here's a sneak peak:

Note: iReggaeCover is having some widely reported glitches and will not be ready until 2018

Secret Message

I had to have a big beer on my lunch break today to ease my too-much-whiskey-on-a-wednesday blues. One time I was so hungover I only made it through the day by eating macaroni and cheese and taking an hour long nap in Union Square. I can write all this because nobody knows how to crack my secret message writing technique. What if I wrote really fucked up shit interspersed throughout my blog? Would people have nightmares and not know why?

Andy's Photo Project

[A rare (some say faked) photo of Rock Death]

I've been telling everybody about Andy's rad ongoing photo project for too long. Now you can see a few of them and read all about it here.

(Somebody give the kid a grant already!)

The Diver

I found a book called She Woke Me Up So I Killed Her on a book merchant's sidewalk table on Astor Place. If the title (or the scribbled dedication to the former owner: "praise the lord and pass the double donged dildo") wasn't enough to make me buy it, the second story was:

The Diver
by Ramón Gómez de la Serna

He was moving from cabin to cabin in the sunken ship, remembering the ships on which he had traveled himself, thinking of them too as wrecks, all ships, those that arrived and those that did not.

He came to closed staterooms, where, once he had opened the doors he had the impression that their women occupants had been in the act of putting on tropical dance-costumes: much decoration and little covering.

It seemed to him that he had come there to collect the passports at the final arrival, and that the passengers would soon be hurrying to present them to him, after looking about for them in the drawers full of photographs.

With his lantern he stumbled into the galley with its rows of hanging cups; it was like the ultimate heaven of all cups and pots.

In the writing room he found envelopes with wills inside them, and saw for himself the fact that wicker rises in water.

He came across dead coins, tips lying in the passageways, stewards who had drawn the bath only too well, waiters fallen onto their piles of dishes, and the dishes looked like giant chips used in the game with death. He saw the ardors of intertwined legs, rows of marks on the walls showing how many days were left before the boat was due to arrive, cancers no longer hidden by the pale and exhausted passengers who carried them.

All this he withstood, but when the poor divers with the huge eye—the watchmaker's glass for sunken ships—opened the door to the second-class dining room with its green chairs and its assemblage of exiles, the dead people there, whether because of the sudden current set up in the water, or out of delight at the sight of the diver, rose from their seats and began to sway slowly, a sarabande of human fish, moving like dolls to absent music.

The diver, terrified to see so many people rise from their seats at once, turned, rushed back along the corridors, and rang the emergency bell to be taken to the surface

When they removed the fishlike helmet from his head, he burst into laughter and sneezes.

—Translated from the Spanish by Paul Bowles

Besides the intense claustrophobia I felt reading this story, it ultimately reminded me of the one—and only—time I scuba dived (dove?). I had somehow wound up all by myself (against all first-time-diver rules) standing maybe fifty feet down on the bottom of the ocean. The thought struck me, "I do not belong here. If nature had her way I would be dead." While it's true I've had the same reaction being in airplanes or in Albuquerque or maybe even some day outer space, never was it as strong as that day I was standing on the ocean floor. "Standing on the ocean floor." Even writing it freaks me out a little bit...

See also:
Jacques Cousteau
Ghost Ship (2002)
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
Below (2002)
Hatchet (1988)