Disclaimer, Part 2

May cause dry mouth, shortness of breath, dizziness, constipation, diarrhea, vomiting, ulcers, lacerations, a proclivity toward violence, hallucinations, bed-spins, internal bleeding and incessant babbling. May also cause a fondness for 70s rock, especially Joan Jett and Ozzy Osbourne.

Please contact your doctor should you experience any desire to sue us. He'll talk you out of it.

Please contact us should you have any desire to wait interminably on hold listening to cheesy music. Oh, and if you want to be passed from voice prompt to voice prompt. Let me give you a preview: "If you wish to speak to an associate, press one. If you have accidentally taken too much medication, press two. If you are now listening to Joan Jett or Ozzy Osbourne, press three."

Please do not drive or operate heavy machinery. Ever. I've seen you drive.

Please call me. I gave you my number. I thought we really hit it off. Don't make me wait by the phone.

Please please me.

Phrases You Will Not Likely Hear My Mother Utter

• That's none of my business.
• Of course I don't mind if you don't come up for the holidays.
• Jimi Hendrix rocks!
• I'm not going to interfere--you work it out.
• I love what you're wearing--it's totally appropriate.
• Frank Sinatra was a hack--and ugly too.
• Who cares what everybody's wearing this season?
• George Bush and Dick Cheney are the two greatest men alive!
  

Why Do I Bother?

I'm reading the very brilliant Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus. Every time I read a piece of work of such stature, such grace, written with so seemingly little effort, I wonder why I even bother attempt to practice the (art?) (craft?) of writing.

Ladies and gentlemen (and perhaps others), in short I am a hack. A talentless waste just burning up his time on this mortal coil. Or just a self-defeating wannabe. Take your pick. Take a passage such as the following (bear in mind that Roth was a mere 26 years old when he had this novella published) and you can see what I'm up against:

... I would go into the men's room [at work] on the main floor for a cigarette and, studying myself as I expelled smoke into the mirror, would see that at some moment during the morning I had gone pale, and that under my skin ... there was a thin cushion of air separating the blood from the flesh. Someone had pumped it there while I was [working], and so life from now on would not be a throwing off as it was for Aunt Gladys , and would not be a gathering in, as it was for Brenda, but a bouncing off, a numbness. I began to fear this and yet, in my muscleless devotion to my work, seemed edging towards it ... .

So rarely do you encounter such perfectly constructed words--words that, despite their inner clumsiness, capture the human spirit so wholly. (I know, dear readers, that this sounds like a lot of pretentious claptrap--but so what? It's my blog. Stop reading if you must. Because it's about to get a whole lot worse.)

Mr. John Cheever, another great American master storyteller, also makes me feel unworthy. Take this little passage that he just casually typed into his journals one day:

Mr. Hitchcock ... took each morning a massive tranquilizer that gave him the illusion that he floated, like Zeus, in some allegorical painting, upon a cloud. Standing on the platform waiting for the 7:53, he was surrounded by his cloud. When the train came in he picked up his cloud, boarded the no-smoking coach, and settled himself at a window seat, surrounded by the voluminous and benign folds of his tranquilizer. If the day was dark, the landscape wintry, the string of little towns they passed depressing, none of this reached to where he lay in his rosy nimbus. He floated down the tracks into Grand Central, beaming a vast and slightly absentminded smile at poverty, sickness, the beauty of a strange woman, rain and snow.

Bear in mind, folks, this is the stuff he just tossed out--didn't use in any of his short stories or novels. In other words, this was practice work. Like a Picasso sketch.

So maybe you understand my plight. Maybe you have no sympathy. Maybe you gave up reading this entry long ago. But you read it just the same. There's hope.

Elvis Costello's set list 9:30 Club, Washington, DC 5.18.07

An amazing, electrified, energetic show at Washington DC's famed 9:30 Club. Elvis poured out 33 songs, mostly from his old vault, in just under two hours. An acoustic version of Alison brought down the house and me nearly to tears. The Washington Post said this:

Costello's willingness to fling open the back pages of his extraordinary songbook is one of the qualities that make him such a superb live performer. Of course, his daring would be in vain if the tunes didn't kill, but aided by the Imposters, Costello drove home the curios and the kinda-hits with such unrelenting kinetic force that you barely had time to remember the chorus of one tune before he counted off the next.

Here's the complete set for you other EC geeks:

1. Welcome to the Working Week
2. Shabby Doll
3. The Beat
4. Lover's Walk
5. Secondary Modern
6. Strict Time
7. Brilliant Mistake
   
8. Country Darkness
9. Temptation
10. Clubland
11. Beyond Belief
12. Kinder Murder
13. Alibi
14. Watching the Detectives
15. American Gangster Time
16. Lipstick Vogue
17. Riot Act
18. I Hope You're Happy Now
19. No Action
20. You Belong to Me
21. Waiting for the End of the World
22. High Fidelity
23. Uncomplicated
24. Radio Radio
25. The Impostor
    
26. Alison
27. Sleep of the Just
28. The River in Reverse
29. Monkey to Man (w/Alan Toussaint)
    
30. Yes We Can Can (Alan Toussaint solo)
31. Hey Bulldog (Beatles cover)
32. Pump it Up
33. (What's So Funny About) Peace, Love & Understanding?

A special message to my no. one-and-a-half fan, DW: I finally posted something. So that set list I kept wasn't a complete waste after all.

Cheers Y'All,

Moe