Literature & Music; Assorted Notes

After showing up for my first day at Wired yesterday only to find that my boss was in San Francisco (I probably should have remembered that), I wandered around Midtown for a while and finally settled down in Borders to get some work done. Predictably, I got only a few pages into my architecture reading before I realized that a copy of Ann Patchett's latest book -- The Magician's Assistant -- was sitting on the table beside me. Though not as glued-to-your-seat-riveting as her earlier Bel Canto, the premise is equally unusual and just as finely executed.

Later in the evening, I met up with some friends and made my first pilgrimage to Jersey on the PATH train for a Decemberists concert in Jersey City. Tragically, I only realized at 8 p.m. that I had forgotten to put a CF card in my camera that morning (the picture to the right is actually from their October 2005 concert in New York City), but my idiocy aside the concert was brilliant. I haven't found a posted set list/mp3 list yet of the performance, but Meloy & co. started with 'Oceanside,' went through almost all of their latest album The Crane Wife, and ended the night with two of my favorite songs -- 'Eli, the Barrow Boy' and 'Sons & Daughters' as their encores. (I did find, however, that someone put up their October 2006 concert at the 9:30 Club in DC ... the set list isn't quite the same, but you get the idea.)

Also, Ani Difranco is coming to Prospect Park this summer. After managing to miss every single one of her shows for the past three years, I will be at that concert.

Linkage

1. A strangely discolored Seurat reproduction? Not quite -- it's actually a photograph representing the 106,000 aluminum cans that Americans consume every 30 seconds. Chris Jordan has an entire series entitled Running the Numbers: An American Self Portrait, which "looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics." His images illustrate everything from Vicodin abuse to annual prison incarceration numbers.

2. The Brooklyn-based design group Fwis has a beautiful gallery of book covers displayed on their site. One of my favorites has to be the typographical masterpiece that is the Ecco Book for Christmas Stories.

3. Knowing my ability to muck up electronic equipment? I'm buying Camera Armor immediately.

4. Fake Is the New Real's site is filled with experimental oddities, but perhaps the most entertaining (and tongue-in-cheek) subpage is their Comparative Timeline: Elvis Presley's Life vs. US Involvement in South-East Asia. Don't laugh until you look at it -- the two are disturbingly parallel. Other equally tongue-in-cheek but slightly more research-based projects abound, including the Common Sense Electoral College Reform -- which creates new states like Virgitucky and Land 'O Lakes.

10 Days Left

...to submit to McSweeney's the unwritten stories F. Scott Fitzgerald contest.

On Pizza Delivery & Immigration

"Well, OK, we are losers by definition, because delivering pizzas is a job for losers. But we're not all dumb assholes. In fact, even with the Faulkner and Dickens, I was probably the dumbest out of all the guys at work, or at least the worst educated. We got African doctors, Albanian lawyers, Iraqi chemists . . . I was the only one who didn't have a college degree. (I don't understand how there isn't more pizza-related violence in our society. Just imagine: You're, like, the top whatever in Zimbabwe, brain surgeon or whatever, and then you have to come to England because the fascist regime wants to nail your ass to a tree, and you end up being patronized at three in the morning by some stoned teenaged motherfucker with the munchies . . . I mean, shouldn't you be legally entitled to break his fucking jaw?)

--A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby

Preteen My Eye

Now I'm not a huge Harry Potter fan, but I've read the first six books and am well-acquainted with plenty of people my age and older who obsessively follow every character's fictitious move. Barnes & Noble, however, seems to think that the appropriate age range is 9 to 12?! What.

30% Off Everything

Pretty damn brilliant ad campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi.

Oh, Lonely Planet

Phrasebooks. You know, those pocket-sized booklets that are the purveyor of useless sentences like "How do I get to the train station?" and "The air conditioning in my hotel room doesn't work."

Well, I bought a Vietnamese Phrasebook this morning on a whim to improve my vocabulary. Clearly, Lonely Planet has been doing some updating. The following choice phrases were included:

Where can I find clean syringes?

I don't know if I believe in God.

I'm completely stoned. Help.

Is there a gay telephone hotline?

I'm a heroin addict.

Seriously, guys. If you need all these sentences, stay home.