The Nepotist

I meant to post this right after the show, but forgot. Anyway, it turns out the Living Room is a nice spot for our music.

Here's our set list from 19 April:

Economics
Worry Hard
Weekend Clothes
Waltz
Like Humans Do†
The Weights
Hang or be Hung
Strange Birds
Sister, do you know my name?º
Most Days I Don't
Stay the Year
Our Love is Gonna Last

† by David Byrne
º by the White Stripes

Photo by Lydia Billings.

This project started with a rule: Humans Only.

The Spring EP, which came before it, relied heavily on drum machines and sequenced synthesizers. I wanted this project to rely on humans. That meant Dana, who I've never made a record without; it meant Hayden, who's been writing the best bits in our songs lately; and it meant Matt, who I've worked with forever, who taught me everything I know about rock and roll.

There are five songs on this EP, which we recorded (mostly) over one weekend in winter of 2011. They're about recent relationships, how they've ended, and how they might have ended differently. Sorry, all ye romantics: none of them are about how they might have lasted. Next time, maybe, when I'm older and wiser.

Hang or Be Hung

Our Love is Gonna Last

Stay the Year

Strange Birds

Lies

Enough Outta You

Nothing New

Worry Hard

Economics

Waltz

The Weights

Calf Audio is mostly a concert sound company, so working for them mostly meant working on site at gigs. But Calf does have a shop, where they store gear, fix it, and do the office work that keeps a small business running. Their shop has a door — has three, actually, but I’m remembering one in particular.

For the five or so years I worked there, the front door had no knob. Instead it had a square bit of plywood covering a knob-shaped hole. Todd had drilled through the plywood and threaded a string through it, secured at one end with a knot and tied at the other to a wooden dowel. To open the door from the outside, you pushed. To close it, you grabbed the dowel and pulled the string.

After a few years, it occurred to me to ask how long the knob had been missing.

“I think since 1992,” Barny said.

I haven’t been to the shop in a while, but if there’s a knob on the door, I’ll eat my hat.

New York apartments survive on temporary fixes. The people who own them live elsewhere, and the people who live there don’t own them. Who’s got time for a permanent fix to somebody else’s problem?

I called Kate last week. She’d been upstate all summer, acting in some plays. We’d hardly spoken. “Hey,” I said. “What state are you living in?”

“Um, New York?” she said. She sounded unusually guarded. Maybe it was was just that she’d been upstate, not out of state, and she doesn’t like stupid questions.

“Great,” I said. “What city?”

“Um,” she said. Then silence. Finally, “New York. Why?”

“Because we should hang out.”

More silence. Was she mad at me? Was it my fault that we hadn’t spoken in more than a month? No, that’s just what happens in New York, and everyone knows it, so why would she be mad at me? Had I missed her birthday? Fuck. Maybe. When is her birthday? I can’t remember.

“Who is this?” she finally asked.

She’d lost her phone, and all her numbers with it. I felt first relieved, then irked that she hadn’t recognized my voice. Then, after a while of feeling silly about feeling both of these, I settled on feeling confused. Why is it okay that New Yorkers go months without talking to their favorite people? Why is this not alarming enough to take action?

It must be true. It was on a bumper sticker. “Drum machines have no soul.” But the car belonged to a drummer, and I’ve seen his band play. You might think it’d be hard to decide who has the least soul in an almost soulless bunch, but it wasn’t. The drummer had zero soul.

That was more than a year ago. This weekend Hayden and I were demoing a new song. We spent hours finessing the drum loop before we started tracking. It had to swing just enough, but not too much, with just the right dynamics in the high hat part. The kick drum had to accentuate Hayden’s bass line without burying it, without getting too busy and without being boring.

This was yesterday. I was, yesterday, really excited about the demo. It’s a good song. We had fun making it. I opened the session this morning and pressed play, expecting to be reasonably pleased.

Nope. Something was off, and often when something is off, it’s me. So I muted the guitar. No dice. I put the guitar back and muted my singing. That didn’t help. I muted the bass, and started to worry the demo was beyond saving. Then I put the bass back and turned off the drum machine.

“Holy shit!”, I thought. The demo now has a hole where drums need to go, but muting the machine gave it space, movement, and soul. I know there are producers who can make drum machines sound alive, expressive, and useful, but after many years of trying, I’ve finally realized that I am not one of these producers.

Drums on future releases by The Nepotist will be played by a human, at least until I change my mind. Which human? I’m not sure. Not the guy with the bumper sticker.

“I’m considering learning to wear pants.”

If a man told me that, I’d wonder.

I’m considering learning to wear hats.

Nobody told me that. It’s actually something I’m considering. Wonder if you want, then listen.

When a man in a hat passes a pretty woman on the street, he can tip his hat to her. It’s a polite way of saying, “You’re lovely.” Unless what he’s saying depends on the kind of hat — perhaps a backwards baseball hat says something closer to, “I’m a dick.” Being someone who doesn’t wear hats of any kind, at all, ever, the distinction is academic for me.

I don’t wear hats because I feel silly wearing them. But suppose I could learn not to feel silly in a hat — not a baseball hat, but something classier. Then I’d have a respectable way of telling lovely strangers they look lovely.

Are there other ways to do that? Why don’t I know about them?

Some love is holy
Some love is hot
More often than not
my love is a show

All love is risky
risky and rough
I have risked enough
been high been low

Why you gonna act like
you don’t know when you do?
I will leave you
early one morning
This is your warning

The words are old ones
I speak to you
more tested than true
in secondhand sounds

Some words just roll well
right off the tongue
It’s hang or be hung
for hanging around

Why you gonna act like
you don’t know when you do?
I will leave you
early one morning
This is your warning

Ben: My friend has “CEO” tattooed on his stomach.

Lexi: Still??

I don’t know what I thought I’d find here. Might I already have found it? There’s a nice thought. If I haven’t found it, here’s hoping I find it somewhere else, because I have just a few weeks left living in this neighborhood.

Last weekend, walking home from a birthday party, I passed a group of guys about my age. One of them approached me.

“You got a dollar?” he asked.

No, I said.

He looked me over, skeptical. “You don’t have one dollar?”

He had point. I did have a dollar. I meant “No” the way someone who says “Let’s get together soon” means that seeing you again is not worth planning. What I actually meant was, “I do have a dollar, but not for you.”

“I do have a dollar, but not for you,” I said. He said, “Man, this is the hood. We help each other out here. You don’t have one dollar for me so I can get a blunt?”

This pissed me off, I think because I didn’t like being told how we do things here. Here is the South Bronx, where I live, and how we do things here depends minutely on how I do them. I don’t believe I owe a stranger a dollar just because he asks.

“I don’t know you,” I said. I didn’t mean that we’d just met. I meant that our differences were vast and possibly fundamental, that we were likely never to understand each any more deeply than parsing the few sentences we had left to exchange.

He understood, I guess, and the number of sentences we had left to exchange was zero. We parted ways without another word, headed for the safety of our respective communities.

Which communities? E.B. White, in “Here Is New York”, distinguishes between New York of the native and New York of “the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.” White means Manhattan, but one can just as well go the Bronx in quest of something.

That’s what I’ve done. Whereas the kid I was talking to last weekend is, I suspect, a Bronx native, and should he go in quest of something, he’ll probably go questing somewhere else.

I’ll never know what it’s like to be from the Bronx. I’ll never know what it’s like to be from anywhere but Ithaca, in fact, and this has limited how and with whom I make friends.

There are the friends I grew up with, who I know uniquely, in a way that I imagine is similar to the way this kid knows his friends in the Bronx.

My own friends in New York are like me: they came here looking for something.

My friends in New York are mostly old friends now. We’ve lived in the city nearly five years, enough time to build a community and start calling it home. We’ve done just that — building mostly in Brooklyn, progressing each year.

But by “we” I mostly mean “they”, at least since college. Since college I’ve been in the Bronx, which, it turns out, is further from Brooklyn than it looks on a map. Did I come here to build a community? From scratch? In a place where people don’t come questing and don’t, when they can help it, come visit?

What could possibly have made that seem like a good idea?

I don’t know what I was thinking. What I’ve been thinking thinking lately, though, is straightforward:

I miss my friends.

Like the first rays of the rising sun
Like the bit of God in everyone
My love is just for you

Like the music on the radio
Like a rerun of a TV show
Our love is original and new

I’m gonna love you til the sun comes up
until the sun comes up
and when the sun
comes up I will be be lost
and I’ll be lost until I love someone

Like my favorite year of middle school
Like a goldfish in a swimming pool
Our love is gonna last

From my history of running out
to the problems we don’t know about
Yes, our love is gonna last

I’m gonna love you til the sun comes up
until the sun comes up
and when the sun
comes up I will be be lost
and I’ll be lost until I love someone

From the pages of a magazine
In a celebrated movie scene
Our love is original and new

Like a man who hasn’t slept for days
with a soul split seven different ways
I know just what to do

I’m gonna love you til the sun comes up
until the sun comes up
and when the sun
comes up I will be be lost
and I’ll be lost until I love someone

---

Tracked live and lovingly to cassette tape, Bronx NY, 2011.

Confrontation is hard. You rehearse a few times in your head before you feel ready — even after much rehearsal you don’t feel ready, but eventually you can’t wait any longer.

You’ve rehearsed enough to know how this will go. You’ll say “This isn’t working out,” or whatever it is you’ve got to say, and she’ll say, “You’re a jerk.” Then there will be a long, heated discussion, during which you’ll try to speak clearly about feelings that aren’t at all clear, try to rationalize them even though you’re not smart enough to know why you really feel the way you do. You’re smart enough to relay a coherent story, and in fact constructing a coherent story is what you spent most of your rehearsal time doing, but you lack the necessary perspective to know whether your story is true.

“This isn’t working out,” you say. And she says, “What can we change to make it work?”

You don’t know, because that’s not what she asked in your head in rehearsal.

I keep forgetting that most decisions don’t get made alone, and that most ideas don’t arrive from nowhere. I don’t know where the myth of the solitary thinker comes from, the lone Philosopher armed with just his thoughts and a pen, delivering ideas and opinions from the void. But I do think it’s a myth.

Good ideas and good decisions come from duos and groups, during arguments and conversations.

Missing is my mother, who took the photos. She’s present in the way she framed them, and in that of the five or six photos she took during these minutes, these are the two she chose to send me.

Sometimes I wake up with a jolt at about 5:30, before it gets light. Usually it’s to write a song, or occasionally to solve a problem. Thursday, at 5:30, I didn’t feel much like songwriting, and the only problem I could think of was that I hadn’t slept enough. This I solved by going back to sleep.

I dreamt of my neighborhood, which was different in my dream than it is this morning. Twice, I think, I’ve dreamt a version of Mott Haven that doesn’t exist. I don’t remember what triggered it the first time, but this time I’m pretty sure it’s that someone tried to knock me out and steal my wallet Wednesday.

It was a little past midnight, I think. I was a block from home, waiting for a traffic light to change, looking forward, not aware anyone was behind me. I remained unaware anyone was behind me until whoever was behind me punched me hard in the right side of my head.

As I fell, part of me shut off. The part that’s writing this -- that part shut off. The rest of me knew I’d been punched, knew someone was now reaching into my pocket for my wallet, and the Rest of Me acted. I remember gripping the guy’s wrists with one hand, pushing him off me with the other and standing up.

“What the fuck?” I said. I may have sounded angry, but I was in fact just confused. The guy -- the kid! --- can’t have been more than fourteen. But on that night, I think he could have taken me in a fight. I was already dizzy.

He didn’t seem interested in fighting. He seemed disappointed that he hadn’t knocked me out, and he took off down the street.

I hope he bruised his fist. I’ve got a decent black eye.

There he is, folks. I’m fairly certain that Batman: The Animated Series is the best cartoon there’s ever been.

Will told me yesterday that the celebrities he knew about as a child seem, still, much more important and terrifying than celebrities he learned of later. He’s right, and for me, Batman is most important celebrity there will ever be. He is Darkness, The Night, etc, and has been since I was very small.

I met him once, I think in Chicago, at what must have been just before the release of one of Tim Burton’s Batman films. There, on the street in broad daylight, was Batman, looking like he’d stepped right off the screen. I could hardly breathe. It occurred to me much later that this was a guy in costume hired in a publicity push, but at the time I bought it completely. The guy, to his credit, played the part with conviction.

I approached him. I was so nervous, I don’t remember how the conversation started. But I will never forget how it ended. He looked me sternly in the eye and said this:

“Remember, Son. Fight crime wherever you see it.”

This was the moment I learned what awe felt like.

“I will,” I managed. What else was there to say? “No, thanks”? To Batman?

You may have noticed that things look a bit different around here. Here is what's new.

1) This site is no longer hosted on Tumblr. Tumblr is free, and for a free service they do impressive work. But their hosting is some of the least reliable on the internet, and more importantly, they don't support New Thing Number Two:

2) There is MUSIC ON THE SITE. Hayden and I are actively working on the first Nepotist album, and when it's ready, it will broadcast here. In the meantime, music from 2009's "The Spring EP" is up and waiting to be listened to.

Yours Truly,

Chris Frank

This just in from the Name Bureau:

A family of four is sharing a table at the Bruckner Bar & Grill — Mom, Dad, Son and Daughter. The boys are seated across from each other, the girls likewise. Their conversations, plural, are in the shape of a cross, Father talking across the table to Son about “cloud computing”, Mother talking to Daughter about we forget what. We remember cloud computing because it was clear neither fellow had any idea what cloud computing is.

It feels like there are thin, red — why red? — perpendicular lines floating about a foot above their table, stretching from boy to boy and girl to girl.

We’ve seen this kind of separation before. It can happen in any group setting, and doesn’t, as a general rule, have anything to do with gender. We at the Name Bureau therefore feel its name should be number- and gender- neutral.

We propose “crosstalk”.

There are two kinds of bad idea. The first kind is forgivable; the second is not. Examples of the first kind include getting uncharacteristically drunk, or sleeping with someone else’s girlfriend. People do these things, often in sequence, and we say, “That was dumb, but hey, you’re only human.”

The unforgivable bad ideas make us marvel at just how dumb humans can be. I live very near an unforgivable bad idea. Someone, probably Robert Moses, had a highway built through my neighborhood. This was a bad idea for a long list of reasons, but what makes it unforgivable is the pigeon shit.

To get to the subway, I must walk under a highway. A highway underpass is a pigeon’s favorite place to eat, fornicate, die, raise babies, and shit. I suspect many pigeons live their whole lives without leaving the highway they were born under, not once. You’d think they’d leave for food, but, inexplicably, people — or maybe just one jerk — spread(s) birdseed under the highway most mornings. My non-birdseed-spreading neighbors and I must then spend our mornings dodging pigeon shit on the way to the subway, often before we’ve had our coffee.

I just cannot believe good Mr. Moses didn’t see pigeon shit coming. If he didn’t, he is unforgivably stupid. If he did, he is unforgivably mean.

Commuting by train can be more intense than commuting by car, I think. The car is probably more stressful, but the train lets you venture far deeper into your own head. And this can be scary. It’s not always for fear of boredom that we blast iPods and read AM New York between home and work. It’s for fear of what’s in the head.

Some guy last week was not afraid. He stood with a pad of paper pressed against the door, writing furiously, but all I could make out was the title:

“Death Note, Part II”

Part II? What happened in Part I? And what if he had said “Take II”, instead of “Part II”? That would have meant it was a suicide note, presumably being written after a failed first attempt, right? Christ. “Part”, I hope, is more harmless, but it’s also much more confusing. What is there to say about the second part of death?

I really did just ask that, and meant it. Tomorrow I will remember that the second part of death is something humans have been thinking about for approximately ever, and that probably many of our answers have been interesting.

Today it just seems like a stupid question.

Shortly after 7 this morning I took a long walk around my neighborhood. I’ve lived here since August but haven’t walked enough, I guess because many of the streets are lined by highways or housing projects. Some of them, though, are lovely, especially as the sun is rising. And even along the highway, the occasional 100 year-old building survives and suggests what it was like here once.

People — maybe mostly realtors — say Mott Haven is the Williamsburg of the future. It isn’t yet, and it may never be, although it’s true that someone will eventually do something with all of the empty factories. Perhaps build lofts, maybe just tear them down. In the seventies landlords who couldn’t sell their buildings here would set them on fire for the insurance money.

Anyway, forget the future. I’d like to spend some time in Mott Haven of the pre-seventies past. It turns out three of the former factories on my block made pianos, and though two of them are abandoned, one is now residential. I know a little about the residential one because I live in it. The rest of them are just sitting there, waiting for something to happen.

Vocals on all our demos are done. We go into the studio for real at the end of February.

I am waiting for coffee to brew. I will drink it, then record vocals on a few demos.

This is not so unusual a situation for me to find myself in. What is unusual is that I haven’t spoken to anyone yet today, and unless someone calls in the next few minutes, the very first words out of my mouth will be sung and recorded. I even know what the words will be, because I know which song I’m starting with.

I cannot ever remember waking up and knowing exactly what the first words out of my mouth would be.

First words are like private first impressions of oneself each day. You don’t usually get to pick them. You just notice whichever words are first out of your mouth and go, “Aha, I must be sharp/slow/sad/romantic/giddy today”. Once I woke up five minutes before a bus I had to catch. The first word out of my mouth was “FUCK!”, as were I think the next seven words, and that day I was irritable.

Today my first words will be these:

First snow in a new city
“Not your city” says snow
Not yet, as it fits better
what becomes of the city you know?
All your friends getting married
You should have said no

In a snow suit and thick boots at sunrise
I march through somebody’s back yard
Stare in through the windows, the dog knows
Don’t worry I, too, stand guard
I don’t have to hit often
I always hit hard

Birds come back
once each year
I came back boys
Not one of you is here
I don’t believe us
Leave us
Four in the corners
Four in the form

I don’t worry for you boy, I know we’ll be speaking
Tin cans and string
You, man, on the next hand for you man I worry
I know no such thing
I know you’re a singer
I’ve heard you sing

Oh

Birds come back
once each year
I came back boys
Not one of you is here
I don’t believe us
Leave us
Four in the corners
Four in the form

I’ve seen David Byrne in concert thrice. Last night I saw the Tom Tom Club for the first time, which means I am probably as close as I will ever come to seeing Talking Heads.

Byrne does the more impressive show, but it lacks lacks attitude. More importantly, it lacks what I guess I will call bandness, since the right word escapes me. Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and the rest of the Tom Tom Club have bandness in abundance.

Bandness is like The Force. It runs through a group of musicians when they are a true band, as opposed to an assembly of hired guns. Audiences can detect bandness; it draws them closer to the stage, makes them listen a little more carefully, dance a little harder, wish they were part of the band.

David Byrne still has a working voice, old songs to sing, new songs to compose, and his pick of the world’s best hired guns to perform with.

The Tom Tom Club have none of those things, but they’ve got a band.

These feel like puzzle pieces, but for the life of me I can’t work out how they fit.

Hayden came over yesterday to record vocals on a birthday present for our dad. After just a few takes, I had to stop him from recording over a vocal that was already really good. Then he had to stop me right back from recording over a good harmony. Why is it so easy to judge someone else’s performance and so hard to judge your own?

Dad is 66 today, and is probably working on his manuscript right now. Over Christmas he said something like, “Well, I wish I were a better writer, but this book is nearly as good as I can make it.”

Happy birthday, Dad. I hope I can learn to judge my work like you judge yours before I’m 66.

I’ll post a track from this session later this week. It won’t have drums on it, because even though playing the drums is great fun, both Kate and I proved incapable of drumming anything anyone else would want to listen to ever.

“Why did you do that?”

I usually claim to know the answer to that question, immediately after whatever it is I’ve done. Then later, hindsight usually says, “Silly child. It wasn’t for that reason at all, but for this other reason.” So I am usually wrong. I think there is just one answer I am always right about.

“Because I wasn’t supposed to.”

Since childhood, I’ve found reasons like you are not supposed to climb on the roof compelling. Since childhood, I have climbed on many a roof. What has changed between childhood and now is who decides what I am supposed to be doing. It was the parents, or the schoolteachers, but now it is me.

Breaking someone else’s rules is a little like spending someone else’s money. The rewards are great, and if you pick the right someone else, the costs (to you) are negligible.

Breaking my own rules still brings a thrill, but the cost is steeper. It’s a heaviness, a sense of self-loathing, like a hangover that lasts all day.

I would like to hire a terrible manager. I would do the opposite of everything he or she required, because he or she, being terrible, would require me to do all the wrong things. I would be righteous and whole.

Qualified applicants can send their cover letters to chris@thenepotist.com. Thank you.

A bit of tile fell from a building today and landed less than a foot from me. When it shattered I covered the top of my head with my hands, which didn’t accomplish much.

Once I was walking through the woods after a storm and heard a tremendous “CRACK” from above. I looked up to see a large branch coming straight down, and I dove. It missed, just.

Another time, I parked a car at the top of a steep driveway and got out to check the mail. But I forgot to pull the hand brake, which I realized because I detected motion behind me. It was the car, starting down the hill. I lunged for the open door, hung halfway out, my legs dragging along first pavement and soon leaves, and I made a futile effort to pull the brake. We stopped when we hit a tree.

One more? I was biking down an absurdly steep hill with no brakes, on purpose, for the fourth time. The first three times had been such fun. This time I hit a bump, caught air, did a half-flip, landed on my back and shattered both my helmet and my collar bone. I didn’t always wear a helmet in those days.

My late grandmother once saw someone she hadn’t in years. Here is what she said:

“YOU’RE still alive?”

The protagonists from my last post reappeared this week. Whatever ordeal the NYPD put them through was apparently short, because they are again drumming on the 4 and 5 trains.

Some people, probably most people, just want to be left alone while they get to where they are going. I am one. This is an okay thing to want.

The drummers do not think so. Most people say hello to others, but not these two. They say hello at others. A woman turned around when they started playing, so they stopped. “Hello!” one said at her. ”You think you can turn you back on us and we will disappear?”

Obviously, no. She just wanted to be left alone. But they kept calling at her, trying to make a show of her negativity, trying to shame her.

These positive people either don’t get hypocrisy, or don’t care.

Today was a terrible day on the subway. First, the 125th St station smelled like something crawled in from the tunnel and died on the platform, decayed there for thirty years in a small box, and finally, in a fit of undeadness this morning, burst out to stink and feed.

The 5 train arrived and took us to 42nd St, where it held for about ten minutes because someone on it was sick, probably from the stench. It may have continued sitting at 42nd St for hours, I don’t know. None of my fellow passengers know either. We all boarded a nearby 6 train as soon as one arrived.

Among my fellow passengers were two twenty-somethings with conga drums and folding chairs. These they unfolded and sat on. They made an announcement. “We are here to turn your negative energy into positive energy, with music.”

Right.

They played. And I thought, Jesus Fucking Christ, why can’t everyone one the subway just leave everyone else the fuck alone?

Soon I felt bad for thinking so, because the drummers were really okay, and may actually have been making good energy from bad. I felt my mood lifting. Maybe this day will not be so bad, I thought.

Near 28th St they stopped playing and started their Coin Harvest. One of them was headed my way, and as I was trying to determine how generous I felt, the guy with the crew cut in front of me said this to the drummer:

“You’re getting off the train with me at 14th St, pal.”

The drummer looked (1) confused because it was a strange thing to have said, and (2) afraid because there was nothing even a little bit friendly about the way Crewcut had said “pal”.

“Don’t try to get off sooner,” Crewcut continued. “See the handcuffs on this guy? You’ll be next.”

He pointed to the guy in front of him, who, lo!, was cuffed. That startled me, then startled me again when I thought about how long it had taken me to notice.

After a brief argument about whether it was, in fact, illegal to drum on the subway, during which the drummer tried to be friendly and Crewcut acted increasingly like a dick on a power trip, the train pulled into 23rd St and the drummer decided to make a break for it.

He had, of course, no chance, because Crewcut had a partner, heretofore hidden, who revealed himself just in time to nab the drummer on the platform. He, the partner, was smirking.

Let us toast the NYPD: To a job well done, to making sure no one puts any positive energy into the subway, ever. Cheers, boys, and thanks.

At 14th St, a decrepit sixty-something-year-old woman boarded and told the heartbreaking story of how she had become homeless, what she was doing to right her life, and why she needed our help.

Nobody gave her a cent. And though she, having just boarded, had missed the earlier scene, she didn’t seem surprised. Just sad.

In New York nobody does anything strange. Among the many things that do not count as strange is wearing Frye boots. Women wear them, so do men, and so do bikers.

When I bought my first pair, they felt not much like mine and a lot like an idea I’d stolen from my ex-girlfriend, which in fact is what they were. She wore boots before I ever did and would laugh at me if she saw me in them.

In Ithaca, where nobody wears Frye boots ever, where I wore them most days for a summer, they felt like mine for the first time. Not just my property, which they had been the whole time. By “mine” I mean a property of me, a useful way of distinguishing me from other people. Mine socially.

The first people to buy iPads got to own them two ways. As property, but also socially. Something is yours, socially, to the degree that it sets you apart from everyone else in your group. Being the only person in town with an iPad means coming up in other people’s conversations as The Guy With The iPad. It means getting stopped by strangers who want to play with it, learn about how it works, what it does.

Social ownership is sometimes a benefit. Part of what I love about my electric guitar is that no one else has one like it.

But I haven’t bought an iPad, even though I’d like to own one, because social ownership is sometimes a cost. I don’t want to be Guy With iPad to anyone.

Most people, I suspect, bought iPads despite having to own them socially, because they’re just that neat.

Other people bought iPads precisely to own them socially. In a year, these people will need to buy something else, because there will be nothing distinctive about owning an iPad. It will be at about this time that the new revision of iPad hits the market, and much money will change hands.

This will happen again the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, and at some point some of the money will be mine.

The Problem:

Brown rice is better for you, but white rice tastes better.

The Solution:

Soy sauce. Makes brown rice taste better, makes white rice brown.

The Shortline bus to Ithaca has one of these graphics behind every seat. I think it is a reminder to wear your seatbelt.

Looks like a still from a cartoon.

What happens next, I think, is that the guy’s head rolls down his left arm onto the floor, where he stares up at his now-seatbelted body. “Safe from accidents,” he thinks.

I’ve forgotten where I took this. Which was bumming me out, briefly, until I realized it’s obviously not somewhere I want to return, and not somewhere that wants me back.

L’s feet are on the right. That’s her beer, and the empty bottle was her beer until she finished it. Then it became an empty bottle. Her beer, her current beer, is a Prima Pils by Victory, which I love but which my friend (who works at a beer bar) says they serve when someone asks for a Budweiser. Because the bar holds beer in such high regard that they that don’t even have Budweiser, because it isn’t a beerish enough beer.

But Budweiser is really pretty okay.

The candle immediately to L’s left is a long, thin wax cylinder, roughly the diameter of string cheese. It burns at a rate of precisely one inch every hour, which makes it more useful than string cheese for tracking the time. Also it is probably healthier than string cheese, because string cheese is bad for you, whereas the candle you just don’t eat.