To the apparently discombobulated, balding gentleman waddling slowly down the stairs to the MUNI platform in front of me and moving back and forth ever-so-slightly just enough so it’s impossible to walk past him and it looks like I’m going to miss my train.
Dear apparently discombobulated, balding gentleman waddling slowly down the stairs to the MUNI platform in front of me and moving back and forth ever-so-slightly just enough so it’s impossible to walk past him and it looks like I’m going to miss my train, and sure enough I got down to the platform just in time for my fingertips to brush against the train doors the moment after they were sealed, and now I have to wait another goddamn 3 minutes for the next one and I’m gonna be late to work,
Fuck you.
Love,
Jacob
To the four tech bros sitting in the table behind me in Little Griddle who have been talking for the past twenty-seven minutes (no joke—I’ve been timing you) about how Snapchat is, and I quote, “the ultimate in scalability.”
Dear aforementioned tech bros,
I have an idea for your next startup—how about you develop an app that makes you shut the fuck up? I’d pay $1.99 for that.
Love,
Jacob
p.s. I also heard you talking about an advertising platform that allows Facebook friends to send each other, and I quote, “the most bomb ads.” If such a product ever comes into fruition, then I swear on the grave of my father, Domingo Montoya, that I will hunt you down and shove this “Instant Grati-Fication” burger so far up your ass that you’ll be coughing up Niemen ranch beef, griddled onions, crimini mushrooms, swiss cheese, and aloha sriracha sauce for a week.
To the young woman who rolled through the stop sign on Page Street and almost hit me because she was looking at her cellphone and not paying any attention to the goddamn road.
Dear really hot dark-haired woman in the black romper driving a Subaru Outback,
I really admire the way you wear that romper—not all women can pull that off. In any event, you need to either (a) learn how to get off your fucking phone when you’re driving, (b) move to a remote location where you’re not around any other human beings, or (c) attach a siren to your car that screams “WARNING! REALLY SHITTY DRIVER AND AWFUL HUMAN BEING!” at all times, so we know to run as far as possible in the opposite direction when we hear you approaching.
Love,
Jacob
P.S. My mom, circa 1998 called, and she wants her Subaru Outback back. Are you even old enough to know who Paul Hogan is?
To the genius working at the Walgreen’s on Market and Van Ness who thought it was a good idea to stop carrying 5th Avenue bars in stock, despite them being the greatest candy bar ever (way, way better than Butterfinger).
Dear that guy,
Fuck you.
Love,
Jacob
To the chick who, when the bouncer pointed to me and asked “is that him?”, replied, “no way, the dude I’m meeting is way hotter than that guy.”
Dear woman who is not very good at controlling the level of her voice,
My face may not be as pretty as what you’re looking for, but my ears are fully functional. And if your Tinder date is anywhere as shallow as you, he’s in for a rough night–let’s just say that unlike the woman who almost hit me in the Subaru, you are not pulling off that romper.
There’s a term “contranym” (also sometimes referred to as an “auto-antonym”), which is used to describe a word that has two opposite meanings. Examples include “cleave” (to cling or to split apart), “screen” (to show or to conceal), and “trim” (to add edging or to cut away at edges). “Literally” should not be a contranym. The word means “actually” or “without exaggeration”—see this cartoon [http://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally] for visual aid. But for some reason, you and thousands of others have decided to misuse this word for the past few years to the point that it allegedly has a second meaning: “not actually” or “with exaggeration.”
I’m calling bullshit here. We already have a word for the opposite of “literally”—and that word is “figuratively.” Try it on for size:
“Shoppers Figuratively Lost Their Minds When Balmania Hit H&M”
“Linebacker Jayon Brown fills a new role, figuratively, for UCLA”
“Bernie Sanders doesn’t like Uber; uses it figuratively all the time”
Was that so hard?
Love,
Jacob
To the guy on MUNI who is standing in front of the train door at Powell Station.
Dear guy on MUNI who is standing in front of the train door at Powell Station,
Do you realize that there are a number of people who are trying to get out of the train car now, but they can’t because you’re blocking the door? That’s why everybody is saying “excuse me” and giving you dirty looks. You’re not wearing headphones right now, and unless you’re deaf, you should be able to hear them. And even if you are deaf, unless you’re blind you should be able to see that everybody else who was standing in front of the door has exited the car temporarily. They know they have nothing to fear because we’re going to let them all come back in after everybody trying to get off at this stop is out of the train. That’s how we do it here—this isn’t Mumbai, where people figuratively have to fight for their lives to get a space on a train car.
And if you are deaf and blind, then I commend you for taking the MUNI, but you should really carry a white cane or something to indicate your blindness, so people know to give you proper space. But realistically, I don’t think you’re deaf or blind. I think you’re just an asshole.
Love,
Jacob
p.s. And now you’re blocking the people who did this correctly from trying to get back into the train, and the doors aren’t closing and I’m going to be really late to work.
To the dude gabbing away on his cell phone to his dad about how his company has been valued at $100,000,000 while riding on the fucking public bus.
Dear dude gabbing away on his cell phone to his dad about how his company has been valued at $100,000,000 while riding on the fucking public bus,
I have an idea for an app that would be even more valuable than yours: one that makes you shut the fuck up. I bet it would be worth at least a billion dollars.
Love,
Jacob
p.s. Once you’re super rich, please (a) donate 99% of your riches to charity and (b) use the rest to pay somebody to cut that fucking mullet. Seriously, the starting line of the 1985 Edmonton Oilers called, and they want their haircut back.
To the teenage girls who create/perpetuate modern slang.
Dear young ladies who are responsible for such hits as “on fleek,” “squad goals” and “YOLO,”
Thank you for making me feel extremely old. That’s hella groovy of you.
Love,
Jacob
P.S. At the very least, you did inspire this classic joke:
Q: Why do teenage girls always walk in groups of 3, 5, or 7?
A: Because they can’t…even…
To the supports of Trump, Carson, and the other Republican candidates.
Dear Freedom-Loving Patriots, Christian Soldiers, and other Real Americans,
Words fail (or, as the kids say in today’s modern parlance. “I…can’t…even…”). Actually, they don’t. Here are some words that describe what I’m feeling right now:
I devote a significant chunk of my mental energy to convincing myself that you don’t exist. I have chosen to live in a city and state that might not be as socialist as I’d like, but that is, at the very least, not chock-full of unabashedly overt racists, sexists, homophobes, and other bigots.
But you all exist, in very large numbers, and now you want a president who is of a similar ilk.
Fuck you guys.
Love,
Jacob
Note: to be clear, that photo above is absolutely not meant to in any way disrespect Andre the Giant. In fact, if I hear about any of you punks dissing Andre the Giant, I’m not gonna bother writing a rant about you, I’m just gonna hunt you down and break your kneecaps. That’s what Andre would do—and he sure as heck wouldn’t vote for Trump.
To Rebecca Solnit
Dear Rebecca Solnit,
I have a ton of respect for you and everything you do, but I was a little disappointed today when, during the panel discussion you were moderating at the CCSF Howard Zinn Bookfair on new interpretations of masculinity, you completely dismissed my question about the blurring of the dichotomy between the masculine and the feminine and whether there still is a purpose to gender differentiation or whether, as an evolving society, we should strive for something close to androgyny. While I understand the need to stay politically correct in the university environment, I worry that not having any open discussions amongst mixed crowds about the key social issues of our time, including the transformation of gender roles, will stifle any progress and ultimately be a detriment to the feminist cause. Anyhow, let me know if you want to meet offline to discuss.
Best regards,
Jacob
P.S. We should also discuss the Google Bus phenomenon. While I agreed with your initial essays on the subject, I think the circumstances have changed and it’s time for us progressives to re-evaluate both our tactics and our rhetoric.
To any able-bodied human being who uses the elevator to go up or down one floor.
Dear lazy-ass,
This building comes equipped with stairs, and The Good Lord gave you a pair of legs, so use ‘em!
Love,
Jacob
P.S. If you’re an atheist, that doesn’t excuse you. You still have those legs, whether or not they came from an invisible deity. And in the time you just took to complain about how I’m impinging on your religious freedom (or, more specifically, your freedom to not have a religion), you could have just walked up the fucking stairs. Instead, I have to wait for the elevator to make yet another stop, and I’m already late as heck because of those aforementioned assholes on MUNI.
13. To the little black fly that is buzzing around me as I sit typing up these rants in a café and keeps landing on my face.
Dear fly,
Once you land on the table, I’m gonna fucking smash you.
Love,
Jacob
Epilogue: The fly landed on the table and I fucking smashed it. The elderly Japanese woman sitting next to me eating vegan lentil soup gave me a fierce nod of approval.
I started working on this post about a year ago (at least conceptually) but, for whatever reasons, put in on the back burner. Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, when I was invited to a “Film Chat” group on the Facebook. I participated in a few of the threads (e.g., “Best movie of 2014” (Nightcrawler), “Most Overrated Movie of the Past Few Years” (Children of Men), “Favorite Soundtrack of All Time” (Singles), “Favorite Movie of All Time And You Only Get To Pick One” (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?—yes, I’m not joking)). On one of the threads somebody mentioned Strange Days, which made me giddy with excitement. I only saw that movie once, when it came out in the 90s, but I remember it being one of those flicks that made me feel like I was on crystal meth after watching it. I’ve never actually done crystal meth, but I can appreciate a movie that gets me so amped up I want to run around the block and break things (hey, I was 14 years old—what do you expect?). Despite having only watched it once, I remember the movie very well, in particular, the kiss at the very end. I was actually going to write an entire blog post entitled “On The Kiss At The Very End of Strange Days.” As far as I’m concerned, it’s the single greatest kiss in cinematic history, beating out the “purest kiss in the history of kissing” in the finale of The Princess Bride, Han and Leia’s smooch before Han is frozen in carbonite at the end of Empire, and, dare I say it, even trumping that scene with Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly in Bound. For those of you who don’t remember, let’s take a look (and I apologize–I couldn’t embed the video):
First of all you have Ralph Fiennes, who is coming off of serious roles in Schindler’s List and Quiz Show to transform into a washed-up, heartbroken, drug-addicted (if we can call SQUID a drug) loser with long flowing hair and a “fuck it all” ‘tude. Is there a heterosexual man in the 90s who did not have a man crush on Ralph Fiennes after watching this movie? And then you have Angela Bassett, who taps her inner Pam Grier to portray a seriously badass limo driver/bodyguard wearing a tight black cocktail dress while kicking ass and inciting a riot—the stuff adolescent fantasies are made of. It’s New Year’s Eve, the ball drops (so to speak—the movie actually takes place in LA), confetti is flying everywhere, and Fiennes puts Bassett in a car as if to send her away. At that moment, my buddy with whom I was watching (on VHS in his attic) yells out, “aren’t you going to fucking kiss her?”, and Ralph Fiennes turns around, opens the car door, pulls Basset out, looks in her eyes, and kisses her like only Ralph Fiennes can. I’ve had a number of New Year’s Eve kisses since then and I’m ALWAYS thinking of (and trying to emulate) that passion. Not sure I’ve ever quite gotten there, but I’d probably go the extra mile if Angela Bassett were involved.
I’m just setting the mood here—this post is going to be broader in scope than that one kiss. Movies have affected me profoundly throughout my life, providing inspiration, entertainment, and distraction, making me laugh hysterically, lock all my doors and sleep with the lights on, and shed more tears than I’d like to admit (damn you, Armageddon!). Without giving away too much here (because I do want you to actually read the damn post, and none of this “TL:DR” bullshit), I’ll say this much: if you’re in your early-to-mid thirties, be prepared to be nostalgic as fuck.
One more note before we begin our stroll down celluloid memory lane (not to be confused with “cellulite memory lane,” which is the subject of a much different post). I use the word “movies” and not “films”; unless you’re British, I find use of the latter term to be obnoxiously pretentious (and this is coming from an insufferable snob). I remember back in college there was this one girl I thought was really cute, and near the end of sophomore year we had to declare our majors and she explained her decision. I don’t recall her exact words, but it was something to the effect of this: “Yeah, at first I was thinking I wanted to be a history major, then I wanted to be a lit major, then a science major, and then I decided on film because it’s really a combination of all of those and all the other majors. Majoring in film is like majoring in life.” After that, (1) I didn’t find her to be so cute anymore and (2) I became repulsed every time I heard that particular f-word.
I just Facebook stalked her. Okay, she’s cute—in fact, I probably lied when I said (1) above. Also, she has the same last name she had in college (not that that means anything in the year 2014).
But I digress. When you’re talking about movies with a child of the 80s, you need to start with the 3 greatest children’s movies of all time from the 80s. You know what they are already, and if you don’t, I’m embarrassed for both of us.
I already mentioned the first one above. Although it might not have the best movie smooch of all time, there is no doubt that no post on movies would be complete without
When this movie first came out, the film critic for the SF Chronicle gave it an empty chair, thus sparking my life-long hatred of film critics and distrust of SF’s daily rag. It’s difficult to express in words how much I love this movie. Oh wait, no it’s not: I love this movie “a shit-ton.” Is there a human being among us who does not think of this movie every single time we hear the word “inconceivable”? Have any of us never looked into our love’s eyes and said “as you wish”? And when was the last time you went a month without being prompted to shout “my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!”? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
And then there was
Actually, if we’re gonna talk about this movie, we really need to include the theme song:
That’s gonna be stuck in your head all day. You’re welcome.
For some reason I saw this movie in various pieces when I was younger and never watched the entire flick from beginning to end until I was around 12. Because of the weird time lapses, I think I was convinced that the movie was truly never-ending (my older sister probably also convinced me of that fact—she managed to trick me into thinking all kinds of crazy shit when I was younger, but that’s another story for another post). Also, Gmork (the wolf-servant of the Nothing) scared the bejeesus out of me and gave me all sorts of nightmares. Other movie bits that scared the bejeesus out of me and gave me all sorts of nightmares in the 80s: the end of The ‘Burbs, Large Marge from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and the opening library scene in Ghostbusters.
Speaking of “bits” in movies:
Obviously this rounds out the trio of important childhood movies of the 80s. When I was in the drama club in high school, I was in an artsy interpretation of Maurice Sendack’s “Outside Over There” and I’m convinced that this book must have been an inspiration for Labyrinth. In fact, according to Wikipedia, “The closing credits of the film state ‘Jim Henson acknowledges his debt to the works of Maurice Sendak.’” Go figure. If you haven’t read OOT, check it out—it’s actually the third in Sendak’s “childhood development” trilogy, after “In the Night Kitchen” and of course “Where the Wild Things Are.”
Speaking of Jim Henson, when I first started doing this blog I at one point contemplated doing a piece “On the Muppets,” but instead I decided it would be more fun to intersperse Muppet clips throughout various posts. For this post, I include my favorite Muppet movie clip, which happens to come from my favorite Muppet movie, The Great Muppet Caper:
Down the street from where I grew up there was a woman named Betsy who owned a video store called Intavideo. I think Betsy was the first crazy cat lady I ever encountered, and her feline companions would often be strolling among the VHS racks, popping out and surprising you from behind a copy of Caddyshack II. Betsy knew each of her customers likes and dislikes and would make individualized recommendations. You’d come in and say “Betsy, I’m kind of sad today, give me something to cheer me up” and she’d recommend LA Story. Or you’d tell her “Betsy, I want to laugh harder than I’ve laughed in months,” and she’d hook you up with Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Or maybe you’d confide in her, “Betsy, I want a movie that I’ll watch dozens of times right now as a nine year old, and then when I’m 33 and watching TV at 1 AM on a Thursday it will be on FXX and I’ll get super-excited to watch it, even though it’s kind of stupid,” and she’d point you to Three Amigos.
Wait a minute—did Betsy recommend all of these Steve Martin movies to me because she knew I liked him, or did I like Steve Marin because of Betsy’s recommendations? I suppose it’s a chicken-and-egg question.* All I know is that my parents were mighty confused when I approached them in my Darth Vader PJs after watching The Jerk and said, “I was born a poor black child.”
Betsy had a huge projection TV in her store that was always playing one of her favorite flicks (if you’ve ever been inside a video store you know what I’m talking about, but it just occurred to me that my 6 year-old nephew may very well never actually set foot in a video store). One day, when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old, I went into Intavideo with my dad and Betsy was showing The Empire Strikes Back (speaking of my Darth Vader PJs—so yes, chronologically, this was before I first watched The Jerk). We walked into the store during that scene where Darth Vader has just finished talking to the Emperor and the mechanical arm places his helmet back on his head. I was really confused, and my dad tried to explain what was going on, but my pops has never been very good with details and he mistook the Emperor for Darth Vader (I know—I know). Needless to say, the only solution was to rent the whole trilogy.
It’s cliché to be obsessed with Star Wars, but I can safely say that the study of the Jedi and the Force has been somewhat of a lifelong obsession of mine. During middle school and high school, my father and I had a tradition in which, the night before my first day of classes, we’d rent the trilogy and begin watching around 9 PM. My dad would usually pass out during the Battle of Hoth but I’d stay up until 3 AM watching, and then arrive at school 5 hours later ready to face another year of painful organized education. Ironically I was a straight-A student in middle school and high school—perhaps I should have kept up the tradition in college and law school.
But there was more than that, of course. You’d better believe that I read the Timothy Zahn novels and Dark Empire comics and owned/memorized the Star WarsEncyclopedia. Rebel Assault was my favorite video game when it came out (by that point, I had finally gotten over Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max). I had a friend in high school who broke up with his girlfriend because she had never seen the trilogy and refused to do so. This instantly became part of my battery of litmus tests (along with “name all four members of the Beatles.” On an unrelated note, I’m still not married). Episodes I-III came and went—I saw each one once and immediately forgot about them. I’m mildly excited about Episode VII, but I did not watch the teaser that came out last week and I have no intention of doing so.
Other than Star Wars, my father’s main contributions to my cinematic upbringing were introducing me to Hitchcock, Mel Brooks, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (we had a VHS tape with an IAMMMMW / My Cousin Vinny Double Feature—arguably the most hilarious 5 hours ever), and A Thousand Clowns, which is my favorite black and white movie ever (and don’t worry, it has nothing to do with clowns). My sister tried to introduce me to horror films, but I was a scaredy-cat and couldn’t fully appreciate them until I was older (now horror is my favorite genre—but the only time I will ever lock my door when I’m home is after watching a scary movie). By the time I was 10, I was ready to develop my own tastes. After a rather disastrous/embarrassing foray into the Police Academy movies (“Why do you think I took you to see all those Police Academy movies, FOR FUN? I DIDN’T HEAR ANYONE LAUGHING, DID YOU? except at that guy who made sound effects”), I discovered Monty Python (and Terry Gilliam in general), and those films gave me years of enjoyment until 1994 came around, bringing Pulp Fiction and Hudsucker Proxy into my life. These introductions to Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers would, of course, be life changing.
I’ve seen Reservoir Dogs well over 20 times. I owned the screenplay and used to read it non-stop. There was a time when I had memorized the entire opening diner scene, and would recite it on command (or usually, not on command).
And then there’s The Big Lebowski.
David Lynch fits in there somewhere too. Mulholland Drive is probably my favorite, followed by Blue Velvet. When the former came out I was in college and Lynch came to my campus to promote it. He spoke in the big physics lecture hall and the administration allowed him to smoke cigarettes while giving his talk. I remember thinking he was so badass because he could smoke in the classroom while nobody else was allowed to do so. He talked about the new movie (which I had already seen in a preview screening) for about 5 minutes and then spent the next 55 minutes talking about Dune and how although it was the biggest failure of his career, he learned more from it than any of his other projects.
My movie interests would eventually become more obscure. While I was at Columbia they opened a location of Kim’s, formerly the largest independent video store in New York, right by our campus and I burned through all of the cult movies I had time to watch (with a focus on Troma films). I spent three years of Japan and watched dozens of Japanese horror films—not just Ringu (The Ring) and Ju-on (The Grudge), but also a bunch of esoteric shit of which you’ve never heard. These days I’m mainly watching random independent thrillers on Netflix. I think Pontypool is my favorite so far.
For the most part, though, my favorite movies, the ones that had the most impact on my development and understanding of pop culture and the world around me, were those I mentioned above before that last paragraph (oh, and during the Steve Martin years, there was also a healthy amount of Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, and Eddie Murphy). I think this is common—most people my age can identify with these movies—and I believe they are, in part, what defines our generation.
My screenwriting instructor at Columbia is the one professor I had in college with whom I am still in contact (and bear in mind that I majored in math, not film). He grew up with classic romantic comedies like All About Eve and His Girl Friday and gangster films like White Heat and Rififi. He still watched most interesting movies (read: non-Hollywood blockbusters or cheesy rom-coms) that come out, but when he was trying to give us inspiration in class he would always reference his classics—and I always thought it was cute that he assumed that Columbia students had actually seen all (or any) of those films. When somebody would sheepishly admit that he hadn’t actually seen Bringing Up Baby (you know—the classic ‘screwball comedy’ with Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn?!), the professor would shake his head and say “the ‘generation gap’ is a misnomer. It’s really a ‘generation abyss.’”
While this may sound like the desperate rant of a senile curmudgeon, I can definitely relate whenever I talk to somebody younger than I. Think about it—how can you possibly pretend to relate to somebody who doesn’t see a hole in the desert and immediately think of the Sarlacc Pit? How can you make any meaningful connection with somebody who doesn’t understand what you’re doing when, at a campfire, you take a bunch of marshmallows and form them into a little humanoid figure and say “Look, it’s the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man!” And in the legal world, how can you expect me to work with somebody who doesn’t catch the reference when I refer to a pair of teenagers as “two yutes”?
For all you parents out there, this is why you must teach your children well. Raise them on a steady diet of Transformers (the original cartoon, of course, not the Michael Bay travesties) and The Secret of NIMH in their infancies. Introduce them to the most important cinematic trilogies (Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Back to the Future) long before you corrupt their minds with Lord of the Rings or, G-d forbid, The Hunger Games. Show them Coming to America, Animal House and Strange Brew and shout to them “THIS, MY CHILDREN! THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TO LAUGH!” But don’t take it too far: when I went to see Guardians of the Galaxy (which was a completely boring, trite, pathetic drip of monkey spum), I was seated next to a man in his forties with a son around 12 or 13. After the “bonus scene” at the end of the credits, the son asked “who was that” and the father answered “that was Howard the Duck–we’ll have to see if they have it on Netflix.” Absolutely not necessary.
And there you have it: my musings on movies. In short, I don’t know about y’all, but I’m sure as hell glad I was a child of the 80s.
I know this piece was kind of jumbled and didn’t really move in a linear manner, but I’m not going to apologize. Did you miss the part where I talk about how much I love David Lynch?
*A chicken and an egg are lying in bed when the egg pulls out a cigarette and lights it up. The chicken says, “well that answers that question…”
A few weeks ago I went to the symphony. It was quite an incredible show: a solo performance by a German violinist named Christian Tetzlaff, who performed 6 Bach sonatas (5 of them from memory) over the course of 2 hours. This is Christian:
Going to the symphony is a very different experience for me than going to a rock concert. At a rock concert, if it’s a band I love I lose myself in the music, sing along, dance, cheer, and become completely immersed in the moment. I immediately go home and listen to the band’s CDs or watch their Youtube videos, and become obsessed with them for a week or so because I’m in denial that the show is over. At the symphony, on the other hand, I often get so mesmerized by the music that I almost cease to hear it. My mind wanders to a different place and the music acts as my guide. With rare exception, I can’t remember the music after the show is over—I can’t hum the tune unless it’s something recognizable to the point of being cliché (like the time I saw MTT conduct Beethoven’s Seventh), but I remember the journey on which it took me.
I saw Christian Tetzlaff with a beautiful young woman. I’ve found that it’s best to go to the symphony with a beautiful young woman, especially one who is likely to wear something sexy yet classy. Besides, I’m nearly 33 years old, and I don’t have that many years left when I can still bring beautiful young women to the symphony without seeming creepy (like the man in front of me who looked to be 20 years my senior, with a woman who was likely 10 years my junior). My date was wearing a gorgeous little black dress. Let’s be clear here–there are little black dresses and there are little black dresses. She was wearing the latter. Her brown jacket lay draped across her shoulders for the entire evening—the dress was sleeveless and she was covering her tattoos. Her tattoos are simple and elegant and it was a shame to keep them hidden, but on the other side of her was an elderly growling man with angry, twitching eyebrows, and we both knew that he would be offended by the side of her young, lithe, bare shoulders even without the ink, so it was better for my date to play her hand conservatively.
When the music started, I slid my hand up her leg and took her hand in mine. She had tiny hands, and as the playing got more intense and I became more immersed in my journey, I practically crushed her hand in mine and she yanked it away. Shortly after Christian Tetzlaff took his bow after the first half, she asked me what I was thinking about during the concert that had caused me to grip her hand so tightly. I tried to look into her eyes but I was still coming back from my mental stroll and it was difficult to focus on anything in the real world. Eventually I stammered out the answer: “My grandfather.”
My grandfather passed away 6 years ago. For the first six months or so after he died, I thought of him every single day. That was back when I was in law school, when I was always looking for a reason to not focus on what I was supposed to be doing. Gradually, my life got busier and my grief waned, and eventually I got to the point where I was only thinking of him on the weekends, then every other week or once a month. Now I only think of my grandfather every now and then, maybe once every other month when I ride my bike up to Forest Hills where he used to live, or when we have a large family gathering for a Jewish holiday in which he would have played a patriarchal role had he been alive. 2014 would have been my grandfather’s 99th year on Earth, and although I don’t think about him all that much these days, when I think about my grandfather, boy do I think about him.
And now I’m going to tell you about what I was thinking during the symphony. This is not an obituary about my grandfather—the J Weekly already wrote a nice one about him so that need not be done again. I’m also not going to re-post any of the three eulogies I wrote about him when he died—if you’re a close friend or family member, you’ve probably already read or heard at least one or two of those. No, for this post I’m going to tell a story, because if there’s one characteristic I inherited from my grandfather, it’s a love for spinning a good yarn. Towards the end of his life, my grandfather began writing his memoirs. He published two volumes, covering mainly his experiences in World War II and 50+ years of practicing medicine. There was, however, at least one story that did not make it into those books. I think my grandfather would be happy to know that his grandson, who is not nearly as good a writer as he, is at least attempting to do this tale a modicum of justice.
Since I know you’re going to ask, I’ll just come out and say it: I’m going to take a few liberties with my grandfather’s story. This is okay—my grandfather himself was a master of adding exciting and fascinating elements to otherwise mundane occurrences. We once ran the numbers and determined that approximately 85% of my grandfather’s stories were bullshit. He made exaggeration into an art—indeed, this is a trait shared by the majority of extremely interesting people whom you meet.
Just as the symphony had two halves, this story has two parts. The first part was narrated to me by my grandfather about a year before he died. I was staying with my parents in Marin for a few weeks in between returning home from Japan and starting law school, and I had a friend who needed a ride from San Francisco to Marin so I decided to drive into the city, pick her up, and bring her back over the bridge. Since I was in the city and I knew my grandfather was getting old, I decided to have dinner with him, and my friend came along. My friend, incidentally, was a beautiful young woman, and my grandfather was chatting with her in a flirtatious-yet-adorable manner, as was his wont in his older years. I think there’s some rule under which from the ages of 35ish to 75ish you’re creepy if you flirt with beautiful young women, but after you reach a certain age it becomes endearing.
He was asking my friend about herself, and it eventually came out that she was a violist. “Is that so? You know, I grew up with Yehudi Menuhin. In fact, he was a childhood friend of mine. Our mothers were very close.” My friend was quite interested—“really? I love Yehudi Menuhin.” I just smiled and nodded, pretending to know how Yehudi Menuhin was. My grandfather explained.
Yehudi Menuhin was born in New York to Belarussian immigrants, and his family moved to San Francisco when he was still an infant. Like all Eastern European Jewish immigrants, upon arriving to a new city they immediately found the local synagogue and became prominent members of the Jewish community. Yehudi’s mother, Marutha, took a liking to my great-grandmother, and the two quickly developed what my grandfather described as a “tenuous friendship,” mainly because Marutha was a nut-job. Not to say that my great-grandmother wasn’t a little crazy herself—when my grandfather was a toddler, she dressed him up in little girls’ dresses to confuse the Ashmedai, the Jewish demon who kidnaps little boys. Yehudi was two years younger than my grandfather and when my grandfather outgrew his dresses, my great-grandmother gave them to Marutha, who used them to dress up Yehudi when he was old enough to be a potential kidnapping victim.
Yes, that’s right. My grandfather and world-reknowned violinist Yehudi Menuhin wore the same little girls’ dresses when they were toddlers.
When my grandfather was a little older, he became friends with young Yehudi. Actually, that’s not quite true. His mother insisted that he play with young Yehudi, because Yehudi’s mom was worried about Yehudi not having any friends. This was ironic, because Yehudi’s mom did everything in her power to make sure that Yehudi would never become a normally-socialized young boy.
My grandfather was already not thrilled about having to hang out with a boy two years his younger. Really—when you’re nine years old, is there any bigger pain in the ass than a seven year-old? But Yehudi was even less fun than other younger boys, because when one had a play date with the prodigal son of Marutha Menuhin, his options were limited. Yehudi was strictly prohibited by his mother from doing anything that would befoul his immaculate, violin-playing hands. Yes, Yehudi was a seven year-old boy who was not allowed to get his hands dirty. That meant no playing in mud, dirt, sand, or grass. That meant no throwing balls or playing sports, no fighting, no cartwheels. I suppose that today, many 7 year-old boys just play video games all day and possibly (and pathetically) keep their hands clean, but in the year 1923 this was not an option (and Marutha Menuhin probably would not have been a fan of video games had they existed).
When my grandfather did actually find an activity to do with Yehudi Menuhin (perhaps playing jacks…no wait, that wouldn’t work…perhaps playing Snakes and Ladders), Yehudi was required to keep his hands engaged on a practice fingering board, constantly repeating the hand positions for various different classical sonatas, overtures, and fugues. My grandfather would be in the street playing with his stick and hoop, like this:
Yehudi, meanwhile, would be sitting on the sidewalk, playing “air violin” while humming to himself. I bet my grandfather would get some pretty nasty wedgies if the older boys found out he was friends with that weirdo Yehudi Menuhin.
There was one day that Yehudi was visiting my grandfather’s house for tea and my grandfather convinced Yehudi to put down his fingering board and come kick a ball around for a while in the back yard (my grandfather was a soccer player. He would eventually play on Stanford’s varsity squad, which won three games in the four years my grandfather played for them). Suddenly, out of nowhere, Marutha Menuhin, who was in the parlor with my great-grandmother, appeared in the yard, yelled “YEHUDI! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” followed by a string of Eastern European cursewords, snatched Yehudi’s fingerboard with one hand and his ear with the other and yanked him all the way home, not letting go of his ear for three blocks while poor Yehudi squealed in agony.
Yehudi Menuhin would go on to do incredible things.
There was this:
And then there was this:
To Marutha Menuhin, I’m sure the ends justified the means. It makes me wonder how many brilliant musicians, dancers, athletes, and other performers would not have achieved greatness had it not been for overbearing, borderline-psychotic parenting and a lack of a true childhood experience.
What is written above is all I learned from my grandfather about Yehudi Menuhin. Although it’s not much, thinking about my grandfather and Yehudi, and in particular my grandfather shouting “YEHUDI!!!” to imitate Marutha’s voice, kept me occupied over the course of the first half of the symphony. During intermission, I bought my date (the beautiful young woman in the little black dress—you haven’t forgotten, have you?) an $11 glass of shitty red wine and we discussed how the Warriors would improve in the 2014-2015 season. Or rather, she discussed and I smiled and nodded, pretending to know about basketball.
When we returned to our seats and Christian Tetzlaff took to the stage again, I went back to thinking about my grandfather. Before I get into the exact nature of part two of my music-inspired mental trip, I’d like to take a moment to discuss an important part of being a heterosexual male in the age of television: the “what kind of man are you” choice. The most famous WKOMAYC came about in the 1960s, when men around the world were suddenly faced with the epic quandary: are you a “Ginger man” or a “Mary-Ann man”?
By the way, I don’t think that is the correct use of the term “litmus test,” but what do you expect from a Google image search? Anyhow, in the 1970s, men were once again forced to make a choice…
and again in the 1980s…
and the 1990s…
and so on…
Don’t be fooled, though—the WKOMAYC existed even before Gilligan’s Island. Yehudi Menuhin had two younger sisters, Hephzibah and Yaltah. Both were brilliant and accomplished pianists before they reached double-digits, to the point that famed French piano instructor Marcel Ciampi noted “Mrs. Menuhin’s womb is a veritable conservatory” (overlooking the fact that it was the nurture just as much as the nature that contributed to the musical successes of the Menuhin children). However, even more than their talent at the keys, the Menuhin sisters were known for their beauty, to the point that the question was regularly asked, “Are you a Hephzibah man or a Yaltah man?”
Hephzibah:
or Yaltah:
My grandfather was a Yaltah man—I learned this shortly after his death. When we were sitting shiva for him (a Jewish tradition wherein, after a family member dies, you have a 7-day long somber brunch), I picked up a small leather-bound volume my aunt had put on the coffee table. It was my grandfather’s journal, in which he started writing while in London during World War II when he was 29 years old, and picked up again 50 years later. After eating, I retired to my aunt’s childhood room with my grandfather’s writings—fortunately his penmanship was much better than mine, so I could actually read his words. The first entry was about how my grandfather was smarter than everybody else in the army, and that he was thus without friends and lonely. I used to blame my own loneliness on similar circumstances, but my intelligence pales in comparison to his so my problems must lie somewhere else.
The second entry was entitled “Girls and Music” and was about five of my grandfather’s early romances. The piece takes up 36 pages of his journal, and 20 of those pages are dedicated to one particular woman: Yaltah Menuhin. Yes, not only was my grandfather a “Yaltah man,” he actually fulfilled the fantasy by dating her…kind of.
My grandfather had known Yaltah in her infancy, but reconnected with her years later, when she was 19 and he was 26. Yaltah, recently divorced (married at 18, divorced at 18 ½), was living with her family in Los Gatos, and when my grandfather went to visit Marutha (I struggle to think of why) one weekend, he became reacquainted with, and instantly attracted to, Yaltah. At that point Yehudi and Hephzibah were already world-renowned musicians, and although Yaltah was no slouch at the piano, she was focusing mainly on her poetry, which she wrote in six different languages. Sadly, I cannot find any of her poems online, or even find any references to any of her collections (according to my grandfather’s journal, she was getting a collection of her French poems published while he was courting her, but that collection does not seem to be presently available on Amazon).
Yaltah and my grandfather became friends, and after a number of weekends spent together in San Francisco and Los Gatos, they took a trip together to Santa Cruz. After dancing cheek-to-cheek in a fancy nightclub just off the boardwalk, they retired to their bed and breakfast, where they had gotten separate rooms. As my grandfather lay in bed, unable to sleep, Yaltah came into his room, wearing nothing but a sexy pink nightgown. She crawled into bed with him and began showering him with kisses. My grandfather wrote this about his feelings during the experience: “I for my part was gradually slipping into a state which in the Bible is described as ‘causing a man to forget his Father and Mother.’”
For the record, he did not have sex with her. I’m not exactly sure why he abstained. My uncle once spoke of my grandfather upholding the proud “amorous tradition” of males in my family, and it’s known that after my grandfather got married, he indulged in extra-curricular activities with ladies whom my aunt described as “the loose Jewish women of San Francisco.” This is all to say that refraining from carnal indulgences was not exactly my grandfather’s forte. However, when he was in bed with the goddess-like Yaltah Menuhin, he resisted. From his writing, it appears that he refused her advances in an attempt to demonstrate that he had willpower, so as to assert his dominance.
In the end, his strategy backfired; Yaltah interpreted his actions as rejection, and no longer wished to spend time alone with him. I’m reminded of a recent scene from the show “Louie.” I think the show is starting to go downhill this season, but there was one hilarious moment a couple of weeks ago when Louie’s elderly Eastern European neighbor tells him, “In Hungary, we have a saying: if you didn’t screw the cow, she’s not your cow.”
On top of unceremoniously dumping my grandfather, in an act that may go towards proving the old adage about hell’s lack of a certain kind of fury, Yaltah eloped with a man named Bud Rolfe. Not long before that, my grandfather had introduced Bud (then a friend) to his younger sister (my great-aunt, for those who are getting confused by the genealogy), and the two of them had started dating somewhat seriously. Yaltah snatched Bud away from my great-aunt, and my grandfather was convinced that this was an attempt to further hurt him, as he was quite close with (and protective of) his little sister.
Yaltah Menuhin’s second marriage lasted only slightly longer than her first. My great-aunt met another nice Jewish boy shortly after Bud slighted her, and they were married happily for over 50 years. My grandfather married another poet (or “poetess,” as female poets were called at the time). His wife (my grandmother) may not have been as famous as Yaltah Menuin, but at least you can find her poems easily on the Internet (she’s also, as far as I know, the only person in my immediate family to have a Wikipedia page). Also, I’ve seen photographs of her in her younger years, and she was way hotter than Yaltah Menuhin.
My grandmother published 9 books of poetry and wrote enough poems for one more collection before her dementia took over and left her a shell of a human being. When I visited her in Israel four years ago she read me the following poem, which has never been published before today:
POEMS ARE SERIOUS
How many people no I mean women young women do you know no I mean understand which is different very from just plain knowing well enough to write about them even a poem something serious as that and if you don’t think poems are serious you’d better stop reading right now. That’s if you can because I’ve probably hooked you like any fish on my line. Though I didn’t plan to write about fish. I never plan to write about anything and certainly not about fish which are cold and slimy until they are cooked and I wasn’t planning to cook one for dinner tonight. I wasn’t even planning to cook. If I can’t help it. Which I probably can’t. Because every loud mouth around here is always clamoring to be filled. And it doesn’t matter with what.
Despite the fact that they were both amazing human beings, my grandfather and grandmother did not have the best marriage. I’m sure they were in love at one point—each was the kind of passionate individual who would never subscribe to a marriage of convenience—but I’ve heard enough stories from my mother and her sisters to know that their love died early on and their divorce after 26 years was not a huge surprise to anybody (except my grandfather, who was completely shocked). My grandmother met an Israeli, fell in love with him, and moved to Jerusalem. My grandfather met a German woman, a Holocaust survivor, married her, and she died not too long thereafter. Then in his 80s he met a beautiful young(er) woman (she was in her 70s!) and although they never married, they were quite the hot item in the San Francisco Jewish seniors scene until his death. She’s Hungarian and still alive, but I don’t think I’ll ask her about the cow-screwing thing.
My aunt told me that the younger Hungarian was the first woman with whom my grandfather had truly been in love, but I wonder if that’s true. In my grandfather’s journal he devoted several pages to listing the reasons why he’s happy that he didn’t end up marrying Yaltah Menuhin. He called her “unworldly” even though she could write poetry in six languages. He said she lacked persistence and was unable to carry her endeavors to completion. My grandfather was also annoyed at her competitive, argumentative approach to their relationship. “There was nothing that irritated her more than to have to admit I was right and she was wrong about something,” he wrote, “and I was very seldom wrong.”
I’ve seen this kind of list before. When I was going through my last hard break-up, a friend instructed me to write down all of the things I disliked about my ex. I wrote about her crappy taste in music, her superficial obsession with expensive bars and restaurants, and her inability to make decisions. On a quick glance, somebody might read the list and think, “wow, you really dodged a bullet there,” but anybody who knew me at all would have taken one look at that list and known that I was on the verge of tears when I wrote it, struggling desperately to come up with a few minor annoyances that I could stretch into reasons to feel happy even though my heart had been shattered.
I knew my grandfather well, and believe me, his petty reasons for why he couldn’t marry Yaltah Menuhin were a thin attempt at convincing himself that he was over her—the 20 pages devoted to her spoke wonders about his true feelings, as did the fact that he prefaced his narrative/diatribe by noting that he could write an entire book about her. When he met my grandmother 3 years after his courtship with Yaltah ended, was he over her? Or was he still fawning over his beautiful poetess and trying to use my grandmother as a replacement? Is that why my grandfather’s marriage with my grandmother ultimately failed? Because she wasn’t Yaltah Menuhin?
My grandfather is one of the smartest human beings I have ever met or likely ever will meet. Did that make finding love more difficult to him? Did his genius breed loneliness when it came to women in the same way it stymied his ability to make friends in the army? Shortly before he died he stated “my regrets are as high as a mountain.” Was his unfortunate affair with Yaltah a regret he carried in his heart for the duration of his life? Believe me, friends, these questions are quite a lot to ponder during the symphony, even while holding hands with a beautiful young woman…
Before I begin this post, I really need to share this:
Great version of a great song.
As some of you may know, outside of being a world-renowned blogger, I live a secret double life as an intellectual property (“IP”) lawyer. I’m not joking! It’s my 9-5, just a little something I do on the side to pay the bills. I’ve been tempted in the past to write about IP-related issues, but I hesitate because if I were to write a post about IP law, I’d have to include a disclaimer that explains that I AM NOT YOUR LAWYER and NOTHING I WRITE HERE SHOULD BE TAKEN AS LEGAL ADVICE and of course NOTHING I WRITE HERE IN ANY WAY REPRESENTS THE VIEWS OF MY EMPLOYER, and I’d have to mention that YOU SHOULD NOT AND CANNOT ASSUME THAT ANYTHING WRITTEN IN THIS POST IS ACCURATE and that HALF OF THE SHIT IN HERE IS MY OPINION—HONESTLY, CAN YOU NOT FIGURE THAT OUT? And I’d need to mention that THIS POST AND ALL TEXT HEREIN IS DELIVERED “AS IS” AND I DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS AND IMPLIED, INCLUDING THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE and most importantly, I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE OR LIABLE FOR ANY LOSSES OR DAMAGES YOU SUFFER AS A RESULT OF RELYING ON THIS POST.
In other words, if you read my post and then get in an argument with your extremely irritating libertarian uncle at Christmas and he pulls out his iPad and provides evidence disproving one of your arguments that is based on something you read in this post, then I am not responsible for any pain, suffering, humiliation, or distress that you may suffer. Besides, you probably interpreted my post wrong. Schmuck.
But enough fine print. As I mentioned above, this post is about IP law. The story of how this anti-technology Luddite became an IP lawyer is kind of bizarre—I tried to become an environmental lawyer and got lost along the way. I will say that in the end, even though I often bitch about my job, I find the field of IP law to be endlessly fascinating. Technology is evolving at an insane and unprecedented rate, and the law is struggling to barely keep up. Unlike environmental law where there are clear bad guys and good guys, the distinction between right and wrong in IP law is not as easy to demarcate, and I often find myself taking both sides in solo philosophical arguments (a.k.a. “two-handed mental masturbation”) after I hear of a new case or issue. If I’m on Muni at the time, this causes people to stare at me…standing on a packed train car, muttering something about copyrights and the right of first sale to nobody in particular. It happens.
Today’s “audible conversation between J and J” had to do with the new anti-patent troll legislation, H.R. 3309: The Innovation Act. Don’t worry, you don’t need to read the whole thing…I didn’t. As I discussed the merits and problems with the bill (speaking in a low, gorilla-like voice for the “yay” side and a chirpy, squirrel-like voice for the “nay” side), I recalled that in the past few weeks, I’ve had to explain the concept of “patent trolls” to three laypeople. In my mind, that was enough to justify writing a blog post on the subject…so here it is!
Hold onto your hats and glasses; I am now going to completely over-simplify some very complicated concepts.
First thing’s first: What is a “Patent Troll”?
No, it’s not that. In short, a “Patent Troll” is an asshole.
Wait, before we get any further: What is a patent?
I think we should probably settle this first. Unless you’re an inventor or an IP lawyer, you probably think that a patent is a piece of paper that says that you created something and own it. This is not quite true. A patent is nothing more than a right to exclude. It’s the right to say, “I invented this whatchamahoozit, and for the next 20 years, you’re not allowed to use it, make it, sell it, offer to sell it, or import it unless I allow you to, bitch.” If somebody wants to do any of the aforementioned verbs with your invention, he or she (or more likely, it) needs to obtain a license from you in order to do so. You can give away licenses for free, or you can receive payment in a lump sum or in the form of royalties (i.e., for every whatchamahoozit you sell, you owe me five dollars). If somebody uses, makes, sells, offers for sale or imports your invention without a license, that person (or company) is infringing your patent, and you have the right to sue his or her (or its) ass in court.
In short, the point of the patent is to allow you to make and sell a product you invented without worrying about others doing the same and taking away your business. I repeat: the point of the patent is to allow you to make and sell a product you invented without worrying about others doing the same and taking away your business. I wrote that last sentence twice and put it in italics because it’s a very important concept that we will return to later. Here is the most amazing video ever made about patents (although it’s cut off):
A patent seems really helpful right? You invent something cool, some jerk steals your idea, and then all you have to do is wave your patent around in court and you get all sorts of cash money—easy peazy lemon squeezy, right? It would be…except there’s one thing you need to take into account. That jerk who stole your idea is probably going to hire a lawyer. The lawyer will stand in the front of the courtroom, and say, with a straight face, “ladies and gentlemen of the jury. The plaintiff’s claim of infringement is completely preposterous, absurd, and downright insulting. The plaintiff has a patent for a mousetrap in which a mouse tugs on a piece of limburger cheese and a 500-gram lead weight is released onto the mouse with a steel spring. This is not remotely similar to my client’s mousetrap, in which a mouse tugs on a piece of limburger cheese and a 500-gram lead weight is released onto the mouse with a titanium spring.” And if the lawyer is expensive enough, the jerk will probably win, and will possibly have your patent invalidated in the process.
The US Patent and Trademark Office will tell you that filing for a patent costs somewhere between $200 and $2000 (depending on a variety of factors we need not get into). What they don’t tell you is that in order to obtain a patent that’s worth anything in a courtroom, you need to have an expert attorney draft the dang thing, and that’s going to cost you between $20,000 and $200,000 depending on the complexity of the invention. And then once you obtain the patent, if you want to use it to sue somebody, you have to prove infringement, and as my boss told me early on in my career, “proving infringement is a one-to-three million dollar endeavor.” Why? Because lawyers, that’s why.
So if obtaining and enforcing a patent is so bloody expensive, who the hell can afford to use the patent system to actually protect their inventions?
Very wealthy corporations.
Oh. That sucks. Well, can anybody else use the patent system to get money?
Yes indeedily-do. It’s time to talk about the focus of this post: PATENT TROLLS. As I mentioned before, patent trolls are assholes. Why? Allow me to explain.
There are two kinds of people in the U.S.: makers and takers. This is a very simple concept that the Republicans have been chanting for years, and yet it’s pathetic how few people have actually espoused the philosophy. It’s pretty intuitive: makers are people who make things, and takers are people who don’t make anything and just mooch off of makers. One would think that society would reward the makers and punish the takers, and yet we do the exact opposite.
Consider the example of the dude who works at McDonald’s. He makes hamburgers, thus, he is what we’d call a maker. I am not a huge fan of McDonald’s hamburgers, but I acknowledge that the company has served billions of hamburgers to hungry customers over the years. These hamburgers are not made by robots (yet); there are human beings required for the hamburger cooking and assembly. And how do we reward these makers, without whose hard work millions of people would starve each and every day? By paying them the bare minimum required by law, which is not anywhere near enough to support a human being.
McDonald’s justifies this by repeating the taker mantra—that every dollar given to a maker is a dollar taken away from the shareholders, who are more important than those serving on the front lines. These shareholders are the ultimate takers—in the past they have acquired large sums of money (perhaps by being makers themselves), and now they can sit back and do absolutely nothing, while taking money from the makers (because if anybody needs more money, it’s the rich). Do investors deserve some kind of return on their investments? Yes. Should it come at the expense of the makers? Absolutely not. As the wise Republicans have taught us, we cannot live in a society where the makers are forced to give up money that is rightfully theirs to the takers.
Patent trolls are another form of takers. They obtain patents through various means, occasionally by inventing something, but usually by just waiting for somebody else to invent something and patent it and then buying the patent from the inventor. Once the patent troll has obtained a patent, it does not use the patent to make and sell a product it invented without worrying that others will do the same and take away your business, which you will recall is the bloody point of having the damn patent in the first place. Instead, the troll will wait for another person or company to make and sell a product that might be similar to the product covered by the patent, and then will sue said person or company. This other person or company likely does not even know that the patent exist, because the patent troll is not making anything that is covered by the patent. In other words, rather than making anything, the patent troll will use the patent solely for the purpose of taking from others who make. The worst part: by bringing these suits, the patent trolls have fundamentally changed the patent system, as now more than half of all patent lawsuits are brought by patent trolls.
Patent trolls come in a variety of flavors.
In the interest of time, I am going to focus my analysis on just two: the “Nagging Little Bitch” patent troll and the “Big Fatass” patent troll.
1. The Nagging Little Bitch Patent Troll
I mentioned above that proving infringement is a one-to-three million dollar endeavor. The corollary to this statement is that defending yourself against somebody who is trying to prove patent infringementis also a one-to-three million dollar endeavor. While this is great for lawyers, it is not so good for a maker who doesn’t happen to have one-to-three million dollars saved up. The Nagging Little Bitch patent troll (“NLB”) is well aware of this fact and will use it to his advantage. For years he lay in wait, watching the rich drive up the costs of patent litigation. Once it got to the point that the average Joe could in no way afford to enforce a patent or defend against a patent suit, he pounced, and as noted above, he has completely fucked up the patent system.
Here is the general idea: he finds somebody who is making a product that bears a modicum of similarity to what is covered by his patent (for example, if the patent is for a paperclip, he might sue a company that makes devices for fastening paper, such as staplers and brads). Even if the case is absurd, the defendant does not have the time or money to fight the suit, so the NLB offers to settle. The settlement will likely not be completely crippling, but it still sucks to have to pay somebody just because you’re actually making something, while he sits on his ass armed with nothing more than a lawyer. If the defendant refuses to play ball, the NLB will continue to file motions and push the lawsuit forward. It’s like when you get a rock stuck in your shoe and it’s really bothering you but it’s not quite worth the energy to remove your shoe and dump out the rock. Then the rock gets bigger and more uncomfortable and you have to pay a few thousand dollars to make it go away.
The worst part is that these NLBs don’t just go after makers, they also go after customers of makers. And the worst worst part is that there are lawyers out there who will assist them in their efforts to make the world a shittier place. As I am wont to say, the 95% of lawyers who are assholes make the rest of us look bad. If you are looking for another reason to dislike those members of the “noblest profession,” this article is a good one—it seems that some guy has claimed that he invented the concept of sending scanned documents as emails and claims that every single person who has ever hit “send” on a scanner owes him money (so yes, that includes you).
NLBs are little pains in the ass, and are the reasons that most people hate patent trolls. But what most people don’t realize is that there are much larger patent trolls out there who are taking millions upon millions of dollars from large tech firms and driving up the costs of nearly all consumer goods (and certainly electronic devices). These trolls, which are huge, multi-national companies, seem to avoid all of the blame associated with other patent trolls, and are skillfully avoiding all of the current legislation. So what exactly do they do? Allow me to introduce…
2. The Big Fatass Patent Troll
One thing that has always bothered me is that as a society we demonize small-time crooks but allow, nay, encourage, theft of millions if not billions of dollars to occur on Wall Street every day. There is a parallel concept in the patent troll world where the House has passed the Innovation Act, which is mainly targeted at NLBs, and yet nothing is done to address the biggest patent trolls who do their best to make life miserable for large companies and consumers alike while contributing nothing to society. Whereas some of the NLBs may have at least made something at some point, the Big Fatass patent troll (“BFA”) simply has a lot of money, and does what those with a lot of money do best—takes from others in order to make even more money.
BFAs lurk around, waiting for companies to go out of business, and then snatch up as many patents as they can from these vulnerable companies that need quick cash. BFAs will also sometimes buy patents from smaller inventors, pointing out that enforcing a patent is very expensive, so it’s worth it to take a smaller pay-out. BFAs have a ton of money and are not afraid to litigate. In fact, they’re able to expend most of their resources on litigation because they’re not busy actually making anything.
Also, chew on this: in many cases, a large company that owns many patents will refrain from suing another company because that other company owns patents as well, and when we’re talking about the top industry players, you can assume that everybody’s products are infringing on somebody else’s patents. In a way, there’s a bit of mutually-assured destruction (although, obviously, this doesn’t stop a number of large technology firms keeping folks like me in business with patent suits and settlement agreements). BFAs can sue anybody with impunity. After all, they don’t have any products that can possibly infringe another company’s patents…because they don’t actually make anything.
BFAs usually go after big companies that you’ve heard of, and while of course we need not be too sympathetic to an electronics giant that is getting sued, the prices are taken out on the consumer (of course). In other words, your new tablet would be five dollars cheaper if it weren’t for some damn BFA…and would probably be a hundred dollars cheaper if it weren’t for 5 damn BFAs.
What bothers me the most is that BFAs advertise themselves as though they are taking morally righteous positions, like they are the ones responsible for allowing companies to develop technology. If you go to a BFA’s website, it may claim that it spurs innovation…because nothing spurs innovation like getting sued. Perhaps the theory is that launching a patent suit against somebody is analogous to poking her in the ass with a big-ass cartoon trident in order to make her run faster.
Hmm, I was hoping I could find a good image of that with Google, and I did not. However, I did find this:
Alright, so now can we please talk about the Innovation Act, and what it’s doing to stop patent trolls?
Sure! The Innovation Act (which has passed in the House since I began writing this post) will make it more difficult for NLBs to bring patent infringement suits. Here’s a (not-so-helpful-but-kinda-cute) video made by some folks in favor of the bill.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”) has written a pretty good summary of what the Innovation Act will do [https://www.eff.org/cases/six-good-things-about-innovation-act]. Assuming that you’re too lazy to click on the link, the EFF lists six positive aspects of the bill:
1. Heightened Pleading – Patent plaintiffs actually need to specifically state why they are suing defendants in their complaints (they don’t really have to now).
2. Fee Shifting – If a patent plaintiff loses, then it could have to pay the winning defendant’s legal feels (it wouldn’t have to now…which is kinda ridiculous).
3. Limiting Discovery – The Innovation Act limits both the amount of time spent on and scope of discovery. This will lower defendants’ legal fees…which is the main leverage point NLBs use to drive settlement.
4. Transparency – Patent plaintiffs will need to state which patents they own that defendants is allegedly infringing (apparently they don’t have to now…wtf?).
5. Customer Suit Exception – Allows manufacturers to step in to defend their customers (so Hewlett Packard would be able to defend you against that bullshit scan-to-email troll).
6. Covered Business Method Review – I don’t really know what this is all about, and I think it may have been removed from the Innovation Act or limited or something, but I spoke with a patent prosecutor about the bill and this was his favorite part, so it must be good.
Also, if you didn’t click on the EFF link, here’s a rad image that you missed:
The EFF doesn’t mind that I posted that picture. In fact, just about everything on the EFF site is available to copy on an open source basis [https://www.eff.org/copyright]. That’s the thing about the EFF—in general, they are for the abolishment of most intellectual property protections. Dirty socialist hippie commie pinkos…gotta love ‘em.
There are two general complaints about the Innovation Act. The first is that it addresses the NLB problem but does not deal with the BFAs. You can read more about that here. The second is that, just as the Innovation Act makes it harder for patent trolls to bring suits to enforce patents, it also makes it harder for small businesses to do so. Most of what I’ve read regarding this argument has been by Fox News, so I tend to take this position with a grain of salt. However, I admit that it does make sense to me—a patent is only worth something if you can enforce it, and if it’s now even more difficult to enforce a patent, a small business owner will be even more likely to sell off the patent…possibly to a BFA (ugh).
I think I’m generally in favor of the Innovation Act, although my opinion could easily be swayed if somebody were to send me an article arguing the other way written by an intelligent liberal (and if you have any such articles, please feel free to send my way). As for dealing with BFAs, there’s some stuff going on in the wild world of corporate IP law that’s pretty interesting, but I want to wait and see how it develops a bit more before writing a blog post on it. Also, I think this post is way too long, and if you read it all, you are a fucking trooper. Here is my favorite Swedish Chef skit:
The other day I received one of the greatest emails I have ever received in my life:
“Hi,
My name is Jen and someone here at Litquake came across your blog. Litquake is doing a fabulous fundraiser next Friday in which Litquake will be hosting its first ever singles event.
In addition to inviting hundreds of literary singles to mingle and cavort, we’re presenting a literary interpretation of the old “Dating Game” show – with un-coupled gay, lesbian, and hetero authors as the objects of desire. Each contestant will compose 2-3 literary-type questions. (i.e. What famous fictional character are you most similar to? Elizabeth Bennet? Lolita? or Lisbeth Salander?).
Would you like to participate? If so, you would earn two free drink tickets and a possible date!
Feel free to ask me any questions, and thank you so much!
Jen”
If you follow the link (assuming that I actually finish this blog post before Friday the 20th, which is not likely), you’ll notice that, as suggested from Jen’s email, Litquake (SF’s largest annual literary festival) is holding a “Dating Game”-style event for prominent SF-based writer. In other words, somebody out there thinks I am a prominent SF-based writer. This is made all the more flattering by the fact that Jen herself is actually a prominent SF-based poet.
I wrote back:
“Hi Jen,
I would totally LOVE to be your bachelor #3, but unfortunately, next Friday is the night of the Lee Fields concert — he’s kind of like the musical version of the Dating Game, assuming that the Dating Game ends with making out hard. Nonetheless, it is truly an honor to be considered in the same pantheon of SF literary hotties as the Adonis-on-earth Evan “Bull Nuts” Karp and reknowned sex kitten Wendy “Maybe It’s Maybelline” Merrill. It looks like it’s going to be a fabulous event (and for the record, I’m kind of a cross between Raskolnikov and Portnoy, and I’d dump Jane Austen, fuck Maya Angelou and marry Margaret Atwood).
Best Regards,
J”
We emailed back and forth a bit more, and Jen informed me that the women of Litquake requested that I sell my Lee Fields ticket on craigslist and attend their event instead. Although very flattering, I’m still declining the offer. Admittedly, there’s a little fear of missing out (or “FOMO,” as it is sometimes called) involved; I have a vision of 70 year-old me, sitting in my apartment all alone and unloved, thinking, “damn, if I had only gone to that Litquake Dating Game, I might have found true love. Instead I’m sitting in my apartment all alone and unloved, naked, eating Lucky Charms and playing Super Mario 3 on my old-school NES from the 80s. The 1980s.” Actually, that doesn’t sound all that bad.
The email from Jen, with its literary undertones (or undertones that kind of sort of have something to do with literature) partially inspired me to write a post about books, and the deal was sealed the following morning during a gchat conversation with a friend. We were having a heated debate over whether a Kindle was better or worse than actual bound volumes with paper on the inside, and words written in ink on the paper. I have nothing against Kindles—they’re very convenient, environmentally friendly, and I am in favor of any device that encourages more people to read. I kind of purchased one myself, in fact. Before I went on my 4-month bar trip, I bought a Kobe (sort of a poor man’s Kindle), which came with 100 books available on the public domain. I enjoyed Anna Karenina, Ulysses (well, most of it—I didn’t quite make it through the Nostos), several plays by Oscar Wilde, and a few others. When I got home, I placed my Kobe on my Ikea bookshelf, where it has stayed since. Why? Because I prefer to read books.
And now, I’m going to write about them.
I love old books. Books that have been passed around to uncountable friends and family members before finally settling on a dusty basement bookshelf, where they sit for 30 years before being discovered by the next generation, or perhaps the generation after that. The fragile pages of old books have a comforting and nostalgic smell, with a scent that reminds me of those argyle cardigans wrapped in plastic in the back of my grandpa’s closet, or a piece of decades-old driftwood found on the beach, smoothed down by years of fine sand being swept across its cracked face.
My friend argued that books get old and deteriorate, but I believe that aging makes books sacred and gives them sentimental value. Kindles are designed to be obsolete; nobody is going to still be using the same Kindle in 10 years, and probably not in 5 (or even 3). The stories in the Kindles are digital copies—they will disappear without gaining any value, sentimental or otherwise.
A book, on the other hand, is simultaneously a time capsule and an unborn child. As I write this, I’m looking at my first-edition New York Trilogy by Paul Auster from the mid-1980s. The simple design of the cover evokes a darker, pre-Giuliani Lower East Side, making me nostalgic for a time during which I never lived but with which I am strangely familiar. However, the first time I read the books, they yanked me into as-of-yet uncharted territory, as I was introduced to Auster’s genre-defying take on sinister, existential surveillance. A brilliant novel reminds us that throughout history, human beings have always experienced the same dark emotions. Let’s face it—few, if any, brilliant novels really delve into happiness.
The Auster books were a 30th birthday present from a very dear friend, which brings me to another advantage that tangible books have over their digital counterparts: you can gift them. Books make excellent gifts, although they sometimes confer upon their recipients great responsibility, or even awkward anxiety. If somebody gifts you a book, she expects you to read it. Unlike movies or music albums, a book takes time and effort to complete, and your friend will be extremely disappointed if you don’t put forth this effort. There’s a good chance that she’s already read the book, and she’s dying to discuss it with you, in painstaking detail, at some point in the near future. She’s kind of relying on you, and let’s face it, she could have given it to somebody else, but she chose you because you loved Oracle Night,so naturally you have to love the New York Trilogy, back from when Paul Auster was Paul Auster. Truth be told, I actually didn’t love Oracle Night at all as much as I loved the New York Trilogy; Oracle Night kind of reminded me of Murakami in that it involved some guy getting trapped in a tunnel right before the plot of the story just kind of disappears. I swear to G-d, that’s every Murakami book ever. I still don’t understand why I read so many of them.
I myself love gifting books, and when I read a truly inspiring book I always feel compelled to give it to somebody so that it becomes something we can share. As a result, I own very few books, and most books I currently own (other than those that were gifted to me and that I would feel guilty if I gave away) are actually not that great, as they are the books that I don’t particularly want my friends to read. I actually plan on donating most of my book collection to the Prisoners Literature Project soon, because when you are locked in a cage, you’ll probably read anything, even if it’s Stephen King’s The Regulators (which he wrote as Richard Bachman, years after everybody knew who Richard Bachman was) or Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live. On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t donate that one to the incarcerated.
I believe that giving books as gifts can change the world, and I have a great family story on this subject. 40 years ago, my maternal grandmother divorced my grandfather, married an Israeli man, and moved to Jerusalem to be with him. She thus became my savta (and this took place before I was born, so she has been savta to me my entire life), and received great accolades as one of the greatest English-language poets in Israel, not to mention translator to many of the most-recognized Israeli poets. She received the President’s Prize from Shimon Perez himself 6 or 7 years ago. No, really:
My savta amassed quite an incredible poetry library in her apartment. It included some classics, with a fair amount of Shelley, Keats, Yeats and Elliot, but the real focus was on the beats—after all, my savta had been at the original reading of Howl (maybe). I spent many hours devouring her collection of Ginsberg, Brautigan, Ferlinghetti and Snyder (whom was personal friend of savta’s; she had several hand-written letters from him). Maybe that’s how I became so damn cool. And of course, my savta had copies of all of her own books. Her writing truly got better with age; each new collection of her poetry was more amazing, inspiring, and haunting than the one before.
My step-grandfather, my saba, was born in South Africa and served in Italy during World War II (in Italy, not for Italy). He fought in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 and stayed in the country, eventually joining the faculty of Hebrew University and becoming one of the foremost professors of British literature in the world. He was fiercely stubborn, quite racist against Arabs (as was par for the course for Israelis his age), a borderline alcoholic (and it was sometimes difficult to tell on which side of the border he sat), and kind of an asshole, but I still loved him nonetheless. He received the Israel Prize (which is basically the Israeli Nobel Prize) 13 years ago for his lifetime of contributions to literary scholarship (I don’t have a picture, but believe it or not, there was a time, 13 years ago, when we weren’t all carrying cameras constantly and the notion of “pic or didn’t happen” seemed absurd).
My saba had a library of his own in his study, filled with early-edition copies of the British classics: the entire Dickens collection, everything by Conrad, a ponderous, elaborately-decorated complete works of Shakespeare (of course), and everything in between. He also had a few “modern” British books (i.e, from the 70s)—mainly mysteries, but also a few comical novels (he got me to read Changing Places by David Lodge, which I thoroughly enjoyed). Of course he had his own books, academic texts on his favorite authors: Dickens, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, and two others I believe. I admit that I never actually read any of his books.
When saba died in 2010, my mother and her two sisters (correctly) determined that my savta could not continue living in the apartment in Jerusalem on her own, so they moved her to a nursing home in Oakland. Two months later, my aunt returned to Jerusalem to dispose of savta’s and saba’s possessions—my savta’s mind was rapidly deteriorating, and my mom and aunts figured that she was no longer compos mentis enough to care about all of the dusty, moth-chewed crap sitting in some apartment on the other side of the world. Some clothing was shipped to Oakland, furniture was donated to the Israeli Goodwill (whatever it’s called), and my saba’s children and grandchildren claimed some of the more interesting tchotchkes, but nobody wanted the massive book collections, mainly because nobody had room in their home for all of those books.
Then my aunt had a brilliant idea. Everybody in my family had read Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life by Sari Nusseibeh. If you want to understand the story of Israel from the Arab and Jewish perspectives, please read this book, and then read A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz. Or read them in the opposite order—it doesn’t matter. Nusseibeh’s book had a particularly profound impact on us; we already knew the Oz side from talking to my saba and our myriad Jewish-Israeli friends and family members, so to read about how a Palestinian lived through 1967, 1973, 1982 and everything beyond, and still was in favor of peace, was quite incredible.
Nusseibeh is the president of Al-Quds University, an Arab university in east Jerusalem that is refreshingly progressive (to give you an idea of what that means, since 2008, Al-Quds has had a “sister university” partnership with Brandeis). All universities need books, so my aunt emailed Nusseibeh, and a day later he met her at my savta and saba’s old apartment with a U-Haul. To be clear—my aunt and Nusseibeh were not old friends, she had simply looked him up online. He just happens to be incredibly kind, charimstaic, and, like any president of any university in the world, thrilled to receive any sort of donation. Would my saba be thrilled about his personal library, which had taken him a lifetime to amass, being donated to the Arabs? Probably not, but who cares? His family certainly didn’t. I’m sure that my savta, who was a member of the ultra-left wing meretz political party in Israel, would have loved the idea of hip, bohemian Arab-Israelis thumbing through her dog-eared volumes of Michael McClure, and maybe presenting one of her own poems in an upper-division seminar.
Thanks to my aunt, Jewish Israel has given Arab Israel the gift of imagination, passion, history and emotion. This is a form of humanitarian aid for the soul. I truly believe that if everybody in the world gave each other more poetry, there would be no war. If peace will come to the area, it’s going to begin with Nusseibeh’s students at Al-Quds, so anything that benefits them brings us one step closer to lo yisa goy.* I like to think that my family’s donation is the catalyst to a new era of literary love between Israel and Palestine.
And speaking of new eras (awkward segue alert!)…
My favorite English teacher from high school had painted on his wall the Henry David Thoreau quote, “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.” I never quite understood why this quote is not a question, but that is neither here nor there (I also never quite understood how to correctly use the phrase, “but that is neither here nor there,” but that is what it is). I think I can actually define a few of the different eras of my life through books…at least my life pre-law school, when I used to actually have time to read for fun. If there’s one thing I hate about my job (and there’s just one…), it’s the fact that I read so much at work that when I come home, the last thing I want to do is read, and thus I end up reading one book a month if I’m lucky. My work has ruined a hobby that used to bring me immeasurable joy. But that is neither here nor there, and it’s depressing me, so I think I’ll go back to talking about the eras.
It all started with Dr. Seuss. How could it not? He was an artist like none other, creating otherwise unimaginable creatures and giving them names to fit his bizarre rhyming schemes. I read every single Dr. Seuss book tens or hundreds of times, but my absolute favorite was There’s a Wocket in my Pocket. As a young boy I was scared shitless of monsters, but through Wocket, Dr. Seuss found a way to convert my deepest fears into cute, cuddly, furry, smiling blobs. Until I discovered scorpions, which still scare the bejeezus out of me to this day.
The picture book era was a joyous one–filled with trips to the children’s section of the San Anselmo Public Library, where I would sit on the huge, turtle-shaped bean bag with a pile of books about robots and dinosaurs until I had whittled down the stack to the three that I wanted to read over and over again, and would bring them to the front desk so that the tiny, shriveled, octogenarian librarian could stamp the card in the little slot glued on the inside of the front cover with a satisfying metallic “ca-chunk!” It’s truly wonderful to explore this era again vicariously through my five year-old nephew. He loves Maurice Sendak and will happily shout out Pierre’s most famous line. I like using him as an excuse to revisit Harold, wielder of the mighty purple crayon, who was kind of a hero of mine when I was my nephew’s age (much to the chagrin of my parents, who came home one day to find that I had drawn purple squiggles all over the kitchen wall. That led to a spanking, if I recall correctly). A couple of weeks ago I babysat my nephew and he asked me to read him a story from one of the Frog and Toad books, in which the two of them go swimming and Frog gets all of the animals in the forest to laugh at Toad in his swimsuit, completely humiliating his so-called “best friend.” Seriously, Frog was kind of a dick.
I don’t know how old I was when I first encountered Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic. I’m sure my parents read me all of those poems from when I was in the crib, but once I got to the age when I could read them myself, that was when I entered the next era in my life. For years, every morning I would greet my parents with, “I cannot go to school today,” to which one or both of them would respond, “said little Peggy Ann McKay!” My life-long love of poetry began with those books. Well, and I guess Dr. Seuss too. Shut up.
My “geeky dungeons and dragons-type shit” era started shortly thereafter. When I was in fourth grade, I had a horrible flu and was stuck at home for a week, and my mommy bought me the first three Redwall books by Brian Jacques. If you missed out, Redwall is kind of like Lord of the Rings meets The Mouse and the Motorcycle. The series takes place in a medieval world where the good guys—cute woodland critters (mice, otters, bunny rabbits, etc.) protect the land from the evil yucky rodents (rats, ferrets, weasels, etc.). I became as addicted to this series as kids in the 2000s were to Harry Potter, and am excited about my nephew getting just a little bit older so I can introduce him to them. Don’t worry, I’ll also give him the Chronicles of Narnia.
Fast forward to my sophomore year of high school. For my advanced English class, I read Brave New World, and my life has never been the same. Not a day goes by when I don’t think of dystopian futures. Sure, I had been introduced to the genre before (Ender’s Game, House of Stairs and The White Mountains (and the rest of the Tripod trilogy) being my favorites), but Huxley’s words registered with me and from them on, I started worrying about society’s rapidly impending demise. Are we living in 1984? Is an Oryx and Crake-style plague just around the corner (and yes, I know that MaddAdam just came out and I am super-stoked for it)? Am I a clone, like in Never Let Me Go? Is humanity just straight-up completely fucked? I ask myself one or more of these questions every single day.
I think the next book that brought me into a new era of life was Crime and Punishment, when I read it for the second time, as part of the classic “Literature Humanities” course at Columbia. I had read it two years earlier in AP English, but hadn’t cared for it much at the time. That’s one problem with high school: you read some of the most amazing books in the history of literature—To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby—but you don’t particularly enjoy or appreciate them. Why? Because you’re in high school, and you don’t particularly enjoy or appreciate anything. Freshman year of college, you suddenly believe that you have this intense understanding fof all of the world’s intellectual and esoteric offerings. You also become more in touch with your darker side…at least I did. Raskolnikov became my literary alter-ego (finally replacing Adrian Mole, with whom I had very closely identified since I was 13).
Sadly, I don’t think I had any era-defining books between the ages of 19 and 32. Don’t get me wrong—I read a shit-ton, particularly before I started law school—but nothing really stands out as a supreme game changer. Then, last month, my sister gave me Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein, and my world has been completely turned upside down. Let’s just say that I’m returning to my dirty hippie roots, at least mentally (unfortunately, my job requires that I bathe regularly). I can’t write about this book or the philosophies it contains right now, but trust me, I will some day. In a nutshell, fuck Babylon (see previous parenthetical regarding my job). I know I’ve always felt it, but now I actually want to act on it…just give me another year or two, okay?
Although there may not have been other books that defined new eras of my life, I certainly went through a number of very important literary phases: the Roald Dahl phase (if you haven’t already, check out his short stories for adults), the Douglas Adams phase (it was mostly harmless…yuk yuk yuk), the Kurt Vonnegut phase (junior year of high school–I definitely would not have survived without KV), the Calvin & Hobbes phase (which lasted about 20 years), the Tom Robbins phase (Jitterbug Perfume remains one of my favorite books of all time), the non-fiction about Japan phase (while I was living in Japan)…I could probably write individual 7-page blog posts about the lasting effects each of these discoveries had on my life. If only I had more time, I’d start a separate literary blog (along with my separate music blog and my separate blog devoted entirely to Pad See Ew).
I want to wrap this piece up, and I end it with one last reason why books are infinitely better than Kindles. Picture this, if you will: you somehow manage to bring a beautiful, brilliant, artsy chick home. She has long brown hair that looks like it was straightened with an iron, John Lennon-style glasses (none of this Warby Parker hipster bullshit), and a jet black beret. She’s sitting on your couch, naked so her tattoo of Bettie Page posing on a spider web that extends from her upper thigh to the middle of her ribcage is exposed, with her legs crossed in such a way that you can just catch a glimpse of her pubic hair, creeping out to form a subtle invitation (okay, maybe not so subtle). She’s sipping on a glass of red wine from your most expensive bottle, which she opened while you were in the bathroom nervously looking in the mirror to make sure there were no remnants of your expensive French dinner stuck in your teeth. She’s turned off the lights and lit a few of those tea candles that you keep in the top drawer of your desk in case the power goes out. As you go back into your living room, where she sits naked (except for the beret and glasses), with her perfectly-shaped ass digging a groove in your otherwise immaculate couch, sipping on a crystal goblet of that malbec for which you played a bloody fortune, she asks, nay, begs you to read her some Pablo Neruda, claiming that his poems make her “go wild.” Do you honestly think, for even half a second, that you’re gonna get so much as a peck on the cheek from her, let alone anything else, if you pull out your Kindle?
For fuck’s sake son, you don’t know shit about romance.
* “Don’t stop after beating the swords into plowshares, don’t stop!
Go on beating and make musical instruments out of them.
Whoever wants to make war again will have to turn them into plowshares first.”
–Yehudah Amichai
I’m extremely picky and judgmental, and I hold people to ridiculous standards that I could never dream of meeting myself. This in part explains why I’m still single at 32. But honestly, how hard can it be to find a half-Japanese, half-Brazilian Jewish supermodel with a Ph. D. (not in anything engineering-related) and lots of tattoos who is into Star Wars, the Simpsons, The Clash and karaoke and who is attracted to brash, balding, neurotic Jewish men? Truthfully, I once dated a woman who had many of those qualities. She dumped me pretty quickly.
My absurdly critical nature does not stop with the fairer sex. For men, my expectations are equally lofty, if not even more unrealistic. And this isn’t about marriage—this is just about me respecting a man enough to talk to him for more than 10 seconds. I’m sorry—if you’re a dude around my age, particularly a white, straight dude from California, there are certain concepts, phenomena, and flotsa and jetsa of pop culture with which you simply must be down. Period, end of story. And yes, you can call me sexist, but there are some gaps of cultural knowledge that are forgivable for women but not for men. For example, I could date a woman who has never seen Star Wars (as long as she’s willing to watch with me). I’m not sure I could be friends with a dude who could not pass a basic Star Wars trivia quiz (e.g., “Han Solo was frozen in ________”). I’ll take a girl on a date if she only drinks girly drinks, but I’m not gonna get a beer with a dude who doesn’t drink beer.
Then there’s music, which is a whole other can of chili. I sometimes date women who are only into Top 40 crap. I probably shouldn’t, but I do. However, if you’re a guy and your CD collection (or mp3 collection or Spotify playlist or whatever) contains little more than various iterations of “Now That’s What I Call Music Volumes 39-47,” then I’m sorry, you have failed as a man. Seriously dude, turn in your penis. And call me old fashioned, but I believe that it’s the man’s job to teach his girlfriend about music, if she doesn’t know much already. If I start dating a woman and the only tunes on her iPod are Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, the Glee Soundtrack and “Don’t Stop Believin’,” I seriously want to hunt down her ex-boyfriend and give him a stern shaking. What the hell was he listening to when hanging out with his girl? He should have at the very least introduced her to Massive Attack and Thievery Corporation, right? Maybe a little Pixies?
When a dude is in his teenage years and 20s, he often tries to be cool. By the time a dude is in his 30s, he needs to just be cool, period. It’s too late to learn new tricks, or to make up for a lifetime wasted drowning in the mainstream. I’ve complied a list of tidbits from the past 30 years that should make dudes around the same age as me smile, nod their heads, and say “heck yes.” If you’re a dude, and you aren’t down with these, I just don’t think we can be friends. And if you’re a woman, and these things don’t remind you of your man, then please email me at sfloveaffair@gmail.com and we’ll see if we can help salvage your love life.
Without further ado, here is the TOP 10 LIST OF THINGS THAT DUDES IN THEIR EARLY 30S SHOULD KNOW AND LOVE:
10. The Big Lebowski
If you’re a dude in your early 30s, you need to have seen The Big Lebowski. At least 20 times. Before you were 24. There’s a game we sometimes play; it’s called “The Big Lebowski Game.” Here’s how it works: first I say a quote from The Big Lebowski. Then you say one. Then I say one. We keep going until one of us runs out of quotes. When we play this game, it should last a long time.
“8 year-olds, Dude.”
“Say what you want about the tenants of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos.”
“3000 years of glorious tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax, you’re goddamn right I’m living in the past!”
“See what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!”
“Donny, you’re out of your element!”
Note: you don’t have to do only Walter quotes—that’s just what came to mind.
9. 80s Era WWF
You know…back when it was the WWF and not WWE. I’m talking the Hulkster, Big Boss Man, Macho Man Randy Savage, Andre the Giant, Jake the Snake Roberts, George “The Animal” Steele, The Ultimate Warrior, Demolition, The Honky Tonk Man, The Undertaker (back when he was The Undertaker), “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase, and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, among others. Back when were men were men, and we were really excited 10 year-old boys. Before Steve Austin and the Rock. Before professional wrestling became a soap opera. If you’re a dude in your early 30s, all of those names I just listed should give you a fat hard-on. In a non-sexual way, of course.
Is there anything on TV today as incredible as that?
8. Soul Music
I think one goes especially for the white dudes in the audience tonight. Your make-out playlist needs to have Al Green, Marvin Gaye, and Otis Redding on it, bare minimum. It had damn better have some Aretha Franklin too, some Stevie Wonder (a little more funk than soul, but still important), maybe some Isaac Hayes, some Sam Cooke and Smokey Robinson, and while we’re at it, some Lee Fields. The fact that I have to explain this embarrasses me. And if this shit don’t make your girl’s panties wet, if she tells you to turn it off and put on some Rhianna and Black-Eyed Peas, then you kick her the fuck out of bed. I mean it.
A couple of months ago I went to the wedding of an old high school buddy. He’s a pretty talented musician (or at least he used to be), and I had very high expectations of the song selection for the couple’s first dance. They did not disappoint:
You could tell just from that first dance that my friend’s marriage is going to last. I certainly would not say the same for any couple that chose “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz.
My lord, is that marriage gonna be ugly or what? Fucking white people.
7. Mickey’s Forties
I will give you a pass on this one if you didn’t grow up on the west coast—if you’re from elsewhere, Old E is acceptable. As long as you can safely say that you consumed at least 20,000 ounces of malt liquor between the ages of 13 and 23, then I think we can be buddies. In fact, chances are that if we are close friends today, there were many nights in which we consumed a forty or three together. And then we probably got citations for public urination. It happens.
I think I like Mickey’s the most precisely because you couldn’t get it on the east coast, so I really only experienced when I was in high school. But also, there is definitely a difference in taste–I’ll take the Pepsi challenge when it comes to malt liquor. Just don’t give me any Steel Reserve. That was complete piss.
You gotta get ‘em started young. Bonus: Mickey’s also came in 12-oz. “grenades” and 64-oz’ jugs!
6. The Konami Code
Don’t fuck it up. It’s up up down down left right left right B A B A (select) start. Don’t mess up the ups and downs. Don’t mess up the Bs and As (although I’ve been informed that you only need to do “B A” once and it will work—will somebody with a working old school Nintendo please verify?). Just do the shit right so we can get our 30 lives and beat the shit out of Contra in like 10 minutes. If you’re a dude between the ages of 30 and 34, this needs to be hardwired into your thumbs. If it’s not, then something went horribly, horribly wrong during your upbringing. But I’m sure you’ve already explained this to your therapist.
Somebody thought this was a witty 30th birthday card to give to his buddy. Little did he know that by fucking up the code, he essentially killed his friend. Dudes don’t kill their friends.
5. The Stonecutter’s Song
I’m not going to hold it against you if you don’t know all of the exact words. I will hold it against you if you haven’t seen every single episode of The Simpsons from Seasons 3 through 8 multiple times, and can’t come up with a witty Simpsons quote or reference that is appropriate for nearly every moment. For example, while reading this post, if you are a dude in his early 30s who is worth his salt, you are probably thinking “Sixty-four slices of American cheese…” or something to that effect.
The Stonecutters episode isn’t my personal favorite (that would be “Deep Space Homer”), but it’s probably in my top 10, and I bet if you asked all dudes in their early 30s to list their top 10 Simpsons episodes, and implemented a point system in which each dude’s number 1 pick was worth 10 points, each dude’s number 2 pick was worth 9 points, etc., and then tallied up all of the scores for all of the episodes and listed the top 10 episodes in terms of points scored, the Stonecutters episode would most likely make that list, in part due to this song:
4. Cindy Crawford
If you ask a bunch of dudes to name the hottest chick in the world today, you’ll probably get a number of answers: Beyonce, Scarlet Johansen, Jessica Alba, Kate Upton, or maybe Selena Gomez (if you’re asking a pedophile). According to Maxim, Miley Cyrus is the #1 hottest woman in the world right now, which means that some time in the past 20 years, the entire world went to shit. Because 20 years ago, if you asked any dude to name the hottest woman in the world, he would not have hesitated for a moment before ejaculating “Cindy Crawford!” Yes, that was meant to be a double entendre. Here’s one example of what I’m talking about:
You’d better believe we were jealous as heck of Richard Gere, and this was before all of that gerbil stuff came out. I think Dennis Leary said it best:
Can I get an amen?
[Note: I know that most of the time, none of y’all actually watch the embedded videos on this blog. Do yourself a favor and watch that last one. It is nothing short of incredible.]
3. The Bridge in the Sublime Version of “Scarlet Begonias”
A couple of years ago I took a day trip up to Tahoe with a coworker buddy of mine. If you’ve ever done the SF to Tahoe day trip, you know it’s kind of insane—wake up at 4 AM, drive up to the mountains in a daze, pound a 5-hour energy, shred all day, then come back to the city by 10. You ended up spending the same amount of time in the car as on the mountain, which is kind of a pain in the ass, but you also can sort of bond with the person with whom you’re driving (as long as he’s not sleeping).
Eventually, you get to that point where there’s no longer any reception for any radio stations, so you switch to iPod mode, and your friend will scroll through your iPod, looking for something he knows and likes. If he’s a dude in his early 30s from California, there’s a pretty good chance that he’ll just put on Sublime’s “40 Oz. to Freedom,” because hey, we all know and love that album. And so, on that very early winter morning two years ago, my boarding companion put on 40 Oz., and we spent a while talking about the 90s California punk/ska scene. Eventually “Scarlet Begonias” came on, and during the bridge we had to stop to sing along, because if you’re a dude, that’s what you do. Come on, you know the words:
“It was the summer of love, and I thank the stars above
Because a woman took her lovin’ over me
And just to gain her trust, I bought a microbus
Because I’d sold off all my personal property
A tight tie-die dress she was a psychedelic mess
We toured to the north, south, east and west
We sold some mushroom tea, we sold some ecstasy
We sold nitrous acid opium heroin and PCP
And now I hear the police coming after me
I hear the police coming after me
The one scarlet with the flower in her hair
She’s got the police comin’ after me…”
And then I knew my coworker was cool, and was willing to give him a ride back to the city at the end of the day (because you’d better believe I’d leave a dude on the mountain if he doesn’t know all of the words to the bridge of the Sublime version of “Scarlet Begonias”). As for you, dude, you’d better have gotten those lyrics right. You lose major points if you mess up the order of the mushroom tea and opium and all that.
2. The State
I own 6 DVDs: Battle Royale, Girl Next Door, and the 4-DVD box set of “The State.” When the DVD box set was released, I was the 8th person to order it, and my speed was rewarded with a free State T-shirt, which is now featured in heavy rotation. I still think about The State all the freakin’ time, and follow all of the cast members. For the most part, anything any of them touch is brilliant—from Wet Hot American Summer to “Stella” to “Reno 911” to “Wainy Days” to The Ten (yes, I liked The Ten—it was highly underrated) to “Party Down,” to all of those random cameos by Michael Ian Black and occasionally even Kevin Allison. I really think they revolutionized funny.
By the time The State came out in 1993, my friends and I were already pretty into Monty Python, Kids in the Hall, and sketch comedy in general. The problem was that Monty Python was a bit too British, and Kids in the Hall was a bit too Canadian. Both shows were just a tad on the weird side. Also, their sketches were too long and drawn-out for our American short attention spans. The State solved all of these problems. Its sketches were shorter and for whatever reason, more accessible, at least to me. The show used popular American music (best use of The Breeders’ “Cannonball” ever), and the meta MTV parodies were hilarious (I particularly like the MTV Sports one where they play golf). The sketches were immediately quotable, and I remember bus rides to and from the Marin City flea market during which we’d shout over and over again “I wanna dip my balls in it!” or “I’m outta hheeeerrre!” or “I reckon a fella can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a sado masochism bar down there!”
Back in the 90s, every circle of dude friends that was remotely cool had that one extended-play VHS cassette with a dozen episodes of The State, which was passed around and played over and over again until the magnetic tape went bad. When it was your turn to hold the tape, you’d view it over and over again until you had memorized every moment of every scene, and then you were ready to pass it on to the next dude. This memorization process was an important rite of passage for a dude, and the effects of it have lasted for twenty years; to this day, every time I wear my State T-shirt in public, at least 5 dudes will comment on it or give me a high five.
It took me a good 20 minutes to decide which State clip to post. I was tempted to go with “Froggy Jamboree,” but I think B&L is more classic.
1. The Princess Bride
If you do online dating, and you browse profiles on women between the age of 27 and 37, you will learn that a lot of women list “Ender’s Game” as one of their favorite books. This came as quite a surprise to me, as when my friends and I were going through our Orson Scott Card phase in middle school, I don’t remember any girls taking an interest (speaking of which, if you haven’t read “Lost Boys” yet, I highly recommend—it was kind of forgotten with all of the Ender hype, but it’s probably my favorite book my OSC—also, I wouldn’t boycott OSC just because he’s homophobic; Roald Dahl was anti-Semitic, but he remains one of my favorite authors of all time. Separate the art from the artist). Nonetheless, it’s certainly true, at least among women in San Francisco. I asked a female friend if there was an equivalent for dudes, something that most dudes will list as a “favorite.” The answer: The Princess Bride.
It may not be the “manliest movie”; I mean it’s not like Braveheart (which incidentally, I don’t particularly like), but it’s hilarious, exciting, sweet, and it has just enough 10 year-old Fred Savage so that those of us in our early 30s, who saw the movie when we were 6-12 years old, felt like Peter Falk (best. grandfather. ever) was telling the story directly to us. Also, it introduced us to the single most quotable movie line ever in the history of cinema, which finally beat out “here’s looking at you, kid.”
Honestly, I should not have to write any more about The Princess Bride, because I already know you love it. I pity the foo’ who doesn’t.
So that’s it dudes—if you’re not down with the 10 things I listed above, then you’re not even worthy of licking the little rubber piece of my flip-flops that gets jammed between my big toe and my index toe. Now that we have that settled, who wants to be my friend?
Wow, can you believe it’s been a year already? Time flies, whether you’re having fun or not. I’m a very reflective person, and of course I always get a little extra-reflective this time every year. How did 2012 stack up in terms of other years? Well, it certainly wasn’t 2010, that’s for damn sure. Not even 2011. For me personally, 2012 was a pretty shitty year, with the two dominant themes being heartbreak and working too much. Both of these themes were directly related to this blog—the first inspired it (i.e., something to do to get my mind off of the pain), the second killed it. I’m hoping that neither of these plays too much of a prominent role in my 2013. For the first, time is slowly but surely healing that wound. As for the second, my number one new year’s resolution for 2013 is to WORK LESS. In 2013, I surpassed my minimum required billables by nearly 500 hours…I sure as hell don’t need to do that again. Ever. There probably won’t be a repeat performance by virtue of my not being in Japan, but even so, I’m going to make a concerted effort to make sure that I end 2013 with somewhere between 1950 and 1957 hours, period. Don’t worry—for normal people, that still ends up being way too much work.
I have a few other New Year’s Resolutions:
Attend at least one concert every month. I had some decent concert action in 2012: Morrissey in Tokyo, Jonathan Richman, Devo/Blondie, Barrington Levy, and a couple of nights ago, the Jamaicans. Other than a few other very small local gigs, I think that was about it. Every one of these shows was pretty darn good, and they reminded me why I love live music (as I noted in my last post). I realize that all of the concerts I attended in 2012 featured artists who have been around for at least 25 years. I guess that’s how I roll; I truly believe that they don’t make music like they used to. I have to point out one small note about the Morrissey show: At the time, the great Mozza’s band consisted of a large drag queen on guitar and 4 very young, very fit men who, at the show I attended, were wearing nothing but black briefs (which were very brief). Coupled with Morrissey’s general sexual androgyny, the entire show reeked of homoeroticism, all of which was completely lost on the Japanese audience. It was somewhat incredible.
I’m not sure that I need much more of that in 2013, but I certainly want more concert experiences. Okay, and maybe a bit more of that.
Not complain as much. I have a friend from law school whom, for whatever reason, gets cited in this blog more than anybody else. A couple of weeks ago, I was having drinks with him, and I started bitching about, hell, I forget…something, and he slammed down his drink and in a genuinely pissed-off tone said that I complain too much, and that most people would do anything for a life as good as mine. I mean, other than heartbreak and working too much, my 2012 probably kicked ass. I got to live in the city I adore with a lot of people I love, working in a job that pays well and keeps me intellectually stimulated, and just yesterday I bought an awesome new pair of jeans. They cost a lot, but they’re really comfortable and stylish. I’m trying to finally grow up a little fashion-wise.
Run a half-marathon. Yesterday I went to Sports Basement and bought running gear and new shoes. The shoe part was incredible. The guy had me walk and run back and forth a couple of times, then he told me that my arches roll and my feet point inwards at approximately 1.3 degrees, and so I can injure my first two metatarsals if I don’t have the proper footwear. He guessed my shoe size on the spot, pulled out two different pairs of shoes, had me put a different shoe on each foot and run around the store, then asked which one felt better and sold me the corresponding pair, with a 30-day guarantee, and they gave me the AAA bonus even though I forgot my AAA card. Sorry for the long run-on sentence, but the whole shebang took approximately 3 minutes and left my head spinning. Anyhow, after all that, I feel like I owe it to Sports Basement to make this run. For those of you who don’t know Sports Basement, it’s another reason that I love San Francisco, and I’m not even that sporty.
Write down something every day. I bought this little “one line a day” 5-year diary, which I intend on filling. I’m pretty excited about showing it to my grandkids.
Create a board game. I have this great idea for a game that sort of combines Scruples, Trivial Pursuit, Celebrity, Mafia and Mousetrap (the last one on a slightly more metaphorical level). By the end of the year, I need to have developed a prototype. I plan on taking this pretty seriously and devoting a lot of time to it, so if I don’t write many blog entries next year, you can assume it’s because I’m working hard on my game. Or stuck in the office because I’m failing at my #1 resolution. Or maybe on an online dating website. Sigh.
Not be so afraid of technology. I’m a technology lawyer, for chrissake—I can start to actually use my smartphone and stop being such an old fart. First stop: Spotify.
Now that I’ve thrown out these resolutions into the internet, that means I’m bound to them, right? If not, everybody in the world has the right to chastise me as a failure. Crap, that’s way more pressure than I anticipated. Can I take them back? Unfortunately, no. As Confucius says, once something is written, it may not be erased for all of eternity. Of course, bear in mind that Confucius lived in an era before the advent of the eraser and “delete” button, but still, the man knows his shit.
I’m getting way ahead of myself here, already talking about 2013. 2012 isn’t over yet (at least that’s what I’m hoping—I really want to finish this post before the new year, but I just discovered Boardwalk Empire…you know how it is). [Update: I did not finish this post in 2012 because on December 31, I unexpectedly had to work all day. My #1 resolution did not apply yesterday so it’s all good.] Outside of my personal life, 2012 was pretty damned interesting, and I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the world events of 2012 that made me laugh, made me cry, or blew me away in general. And as I am wont to do, I’ll present such events in the form of a top 10 list.
THE TOP 10 THINGS FROM 2012 THAT ELICITED FROM ME SOME SORT OF EMOTIONAL RESPONSE:
10. The Death of Adam Yauch. Okay, I admit, in order to remember ten items for this list, I had to go back and look at all of my Facebook posts from the past year. On May 4th, I posted “If this is gonna be that kind of a party, I’m gonna stick my dick in the mashed potatoes. RIP MCA.” When I heard the sad news, I dusted off my old Paul’s Boutique mp3s, and thought back to my younger, formative years. If you’re my age, your older sibling (or friend’s older sibling) probably introduced you to the Beasties when you were just a wee lad or lass, and you thought that Brass Monkey was the most amazing song in the world (and you envisioned an actual metallic primate when you heard it). Yes, the Beastie Boys were clearly older than you, but not that much older, right? MCA was way too young to die. I’m pretty sure we all miss him. The Beastie Boys were one of those few bands that everybody really enjoyed. Have you ever heard somebody say, “you know what, I don’t really like the Beastie Boys.” Of course you haven’t. And if you ever do, you give them a back-handed bitch slap. Right in the kisser.
9. Season 3 of The Walking Dead. I’m really into this show. I’ll admit that I did not like Season 1 so much–for many years, I’ve been a die-hard zombie fan, and I felt like the inaugural season didn’t contribute much that Romero hadn’t already played out years before. But then came Season 2, which got me excited, and Season 3 just kicked ass (or is in the process of kicking ass, as the case may be). Merle with a bayonet hand! Michonne! Prison zombies! I don’t think I’ve been this excited about a show since Battlestar Galactica.
8. Hurricane Sandy. I went to Columbia for undergrad, but during the big blackout of 2003 I was studying abroad in Australia, so I missed out on all of that fun. I remember hearing stories about people walking home from work, and having fun spontaneous parties and candle-lit acoustic concerts with strangers in their buildings. Although I was having the time of my life in Oz, I was kind of bummed that I missed it. When I first started reading about Sandy (mainly through reports from friends on Facebook), I had that same feeling–it sounded kind of fun, and I almost wished I was there. Then it started to sound awful. Weeks with no power or hot water. Apartments ruined, possessions destroyed. I have one friend who was friends with one of the people who died. Like the Japan earthquake of 2011, it was a painful reminder that Mother Nature simply doesn’t give a fuck about humans. It also served as a frightening warning that with climate change, these events are going to increase in frequency. I know that we’re strapped for cash in the U.S., but we need to start taking adaptive measures pronto.
7. National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. A.k.a., “the Obamacare Supreme Court decision.” Unless it has to do with patent or copyright law, I don’t really ever read cases, but my mom wanted me to explain the decision to her so I took a full 3 or 4 hours to read it. I genuinely think Roberts is a smart guy (I would never say that about Thomas or Alito), and I’m very happy that he chose to not toe the party line on this one. Obamacare is hardly perfect, but I love the idea of as many Americans as possible having health insurance. Some may call this notion communism or socialism; I call it common sense for a civilized nation. I have no idea if this was a one-off for Roberts, or if he’s going to start taking the liberal approach on other issues as well. Could he be on the good side during the gay marriage cases next year? Oh man, once Obama replaces Kennedy and the SC is liberal for the next 15 years, the good times are gonna roll.
6. Call Me Maybe. At some point last year—it may have been June, or May, or even when I was back in Japan, I noticed that a lot of friends were posting videos related to this song on Facebook. There was the actual song, and remixes, and parodies (from SNL to Sesame Street), and all sorts of memes or whatever-the-hell you call them. You know, like that picture of David Bowie from Labyrinth that said, “I just met you, and this is crazy, but here’s my labyrinth, I stole your baby,” and so forth. I avoided listening to the song for as long as I could, because I knew I’d hate it. Then in July I went to NY for my birthday and 2 weddings. After my birthday party at Cherry Tavern, I took a cab back to Brooklyn with my friend, and this horrible abomination of noise (I hesitate to even call it a “song”) came on. Fortunately, I was so wasted that I didn’t really hear it. However, it came on again at the first wedding. And then the second. And then every single night out after that for the rest of the summer. People: this shit is G-d awful. It might be a new low for pop music, and that is really, really saying something. I lost a lot of faith in humanity knowing that this song was the #1 summer jam in the U.S. Thank G-d Gangam Style came out and rescued our nation (and the world) from the auditory abyss that was Call Me Maybe. Let’s put it this way: I was not at all surprised to learn that the singer is Canadian. This is their revenge for all of the jokes over the past however many years. They’re all up across the border eating poutines and laughing hysterically.
5. Trayvon Martin. This unpleasant incident led me to disrespect hardcore conservatives even more than I already did. I do not understand why guns are ever equated with “manliness”. To me they represent the opposite. Real men can fight (or resolve their conflicts through non-violent means, but that’s not the point here). Any coward or weakling can kill somebody with a gun. The fate of George Zimmerman has yet to be decided, but I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if he walks, due to Florida’s “stand your ground” rule. The phrase “stand your ground” is somewhat deceptive, because it implies that the person invoking it has big cajones. Real men stand their ground! The truth is that, it appears that the “stand your ground” rule means that if you pick a fight with somebody whom you outweigh by 90 pounds, and you legitimately get your ass kicked, you’re allowed to take out your gun (which you had hidden the whole time) and shoot and kill him. Bonus points if he’s black (because then you can more easily claim that he was a “thug”)! They really should call it the “complete and utter pussy” rule. I truly believe that hardcore conservatives in support of these laws get some sort of sexual arousal from firearms. As I told one conservative friend of mine (who sent me an email with a bunch of pictures of big guns), I prefer to jerk off looking at naked ladies.
4. The latest Israel-Palestine Kerfuffle. I do not mean to disrespect the victims of what actually happened by calling it a “kerfuffle,” I just really like that word. The affair already inspired me to write one entire blog post, so I need not say much more on it, except that the whole world needs love, and the Middle East needs it especially.
3. Romney Loses the Election. Some may argue that Obama winning the election was the real story of 2012, but not to me. I don’t love Obama. I like him. I think he’s doing an okay job after being dealt a crappy hand. But I really did not like Mr. Romney. Since around the time I was born (i.e., the Reagan years), the sole purpose of the Republican Party has been to help the rich get richer. Sure, they toss poor white trash a few bones by promising to do their best to eliminate rights for gays, blacks, Hispanics, and of course women, and occasionally throw in some rhetoric about protecting guns, but the bottom line is that the vast majority of actual Republican legislative and executive policies are centered around helping big finance, big pharma, big oil, and other big swinging dicks maintain their control of Washington, the U.S., and the world at large. Most Republicans, at the very least, try to pretend that they will somehow confer benefit on the non-rich. Romney didn’t even bother with that. He actually produced bumper stickers that said, “Romney: If you’re not rich, go fuck yourself,” and he had no qualms using this as his campaign song:
Even though Romney was clearly and explicitly only trying to help the top 1-5% of earners in America (his infamous “if you make less than $200K per year, you can suck my hairy Mormon balls” speech made that clear), he still received roughly 49% of the vote, removing any doubt that a huge swath of the American public are misguided, bumbling morons. But Romney lost, and then, when Obama tried to at least pretend to be nice, Romney, still not understanding the general concept of being a public figure, responded that Obama only won because he “gave gifts” to blacks, Hispanics, and young people. Note: although I may of exaggerated some of the other things Romney said and did during his campaign, that last sentence was true. I don’t often use the term “douchenozzle,” but I really can’t think of any other word to describe Mitt Romney.
2. The Sandy Hook Shooting. Every year has devastating tragedies, and 2012 was no different. The Colorado theater shooting, Delhi bus gang rape, Eid mosque bombing, and an unpleasantly high number of other such incidents all struck chords with me this year, but for whatever reason, I’ve taken great interest in the discussion Sandy Hook has inspired so far (and will hopefully continue to inspire). In the past, the gun debate has been ridiculously black-and-white: we either need to remove all guns, or give every American (legal American, that is) the right to carry any sort of weapon anywhere at all times. After Sandy Hook, the debate has widened: what kinds of weapons? What kinds of ammo? What about the causes of the shooting? What about mental health? Should we have armed guards in schools? What deters/prevents violence? I’ve been reading as much as I can on all sides of the conversation, and I am a bit surprised to find that Michael Moore has written, by far, the best piece on the subject to date. I’m most curious to see if this whole incident inspires politicians to grow some balls and stand up to the NRA. Imagine that—politicians caring more about their constituents than about special interests! In the end, I hope that something, anything, is done—more resources for the mentally ill, less access to the most advanced killing machines, more protection for schools. No matter if you’re a liberal or conservative, I think we can all agree that we cannot allow these children to have died in vain.
1. Giants win the World Series. I’ve already expressed my love for my boys in Orange and Black here, but I think it’s worth noting that in a year that was otherwise pretty difficult for me, the one memory that stands out more than any of the others is walking down Mission Street in my Buster Posey jersey, high fiving every single person I saw, screaming at the top of my lungs, and being filled with a euphoria that I hadn’t felt for the longest time (bear in mind that I was not in country when the Giants won in 2010, so I missed out on that fun the first time around). I’m not the manliest guy out there (as you can tell for my lack of love for guns), but I pity anybody who refuses to have any sort of emotional connection to his or her local sports teams. As a sports fan, you subject yourself to a lot of heartbreak, but in times of victory, the payoff is absolutely worth it.
So there you have it kiddies. I was texting with a buddy of mine yesterday trying to think of a good quote to kick off 2013, and I initially suggested “may 2013 suck slightly less than 2012,” but he had a much more optimistic outlook on the new year that I will leave you with:
A couple of weeks ago I hung out with a very old, very dear friend. We hadn’t seen each other in quite some time, and I was looking forward to catching up. We have one of those friendships—you know the type—we can go years without seeing each other or talking or really communicating at all, but when we finally do see each other we pick up right where we left off and it’s as if no time at all has passed.
That’s usually how it is anyway, but not so much this last time. Or the two times before that. It ends up that in the past few years, my dear friend’s life has become more problematic than I could ever believe, and he’s become somewhat of an alcoholic. This has put somewhat of a damper on our friendship, a damper that I hope is only temporary. The whole encounter left me feeling somewhat depressed, but also inspired me to want to write. I began penning a blog post entitled “On the Tragedy of the Human Condition.” Shortly after I began, I got sucked away on a deal for work that involved working 10+ hours 12 days in a row—it made me kind of nostalgic for Tokyo (for those of you lovely people who read my Tokyo blog post before I had to take it down). Then the shooting in Connecticut occurred. My deal signed and I got the weekend off, and continued with my blog post on tragedy, haunted by a highly unwelcome source of new inspiration.
Then, on Sunday night, I decided to take a night off from depressing thoughts to go to a Barryington Levy concert in Oakland. I normally don’t go out on a school night, and I knew it was going to be a late affair (doors opened at 10, Barrington came on at 1…I had to take the late-night bus home because BART was done), but it was damn worth it. At 48 years old, the man still knows how to put on a show. If you can’t remember who Barrington Levy is, I present you with his biggest hit:
Admittedly, he didn’t do so well with that track live, but he completely killed it on every other song so it was worth it. I hadn’t been to a really great concert in a while, and this performance reminded me why there is sometimes no substitute for a kick-ass live music performance. I got home at around 3:30 Monday morning and was on the Muni to work by 9, and as I rode, I was thinking about how in a world full of violent political unrest, mental illness-fueled murder, poverty, alcoholism, and unthinkable tragedy at seemingly every turn, sometimes it’s most important for us to focus on what brings us unbridled happiness. There’s enough shit in this world; you don’t need to read about it on my blog (at least not this week).
As I rode, I thought more about how happy the Barrington Levy show had made me, and reminisced about other live performances that have put a grin on my face that lasted a few days after the music ended. I think I’d like to tell you about these shows—maybe they’ll make you smile a bit too. There’s plenty of tragedy all over the ‘net these days, and the world is ending on Friday for all we know [UPDATE: I was late on this post. As you know, the world didn’t end]. Let’s spend a moment thinking about the things we love, shall we? To this conversation, I will contribute memoirs on the TOP 10 LIVE SHOWS I’VE ATTENDED IN MY LIFE:
10. Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival, (Byron Bay, Australia, 2003). I liked to think I was laid-back growing up in California, but 2 harsh winters in New York my freshman and sophomore year of college made me into a bitter, cynical asshole, completely incapable of smiling. I realized that I couldn’t handle a third winter in a row, so “Spring” semester (let’s face it, it’s Winter, not Spring) of my junior year I “studied” abroad in Sydney, Australia. I began to get my smile back, but it wasn’t until we took a road trip up to Byron Bay for Spring Break that I entered a state of happiness that I hadn’t felt since leaving California. Ben Harper and Jack Johnson were headlining, but I was more interested in Ozomatli, Violent Femmes, Shane McGowan, G-Love, and a bunch of local, slightly hippie-ish Aussie acts. I was with a few close friends, and after trying to camp out on the beach and getting soaked in the pouring rain, we met some kind folks who were renting a house let us stay with them, precipitating a weekend of amazing cooking, kick-ass music, and complete and utter debauchery. From that weekend on (I think the festival was 3 or 4 days), I started smiling, and didn’t stop smiling again until I started law school 5 years later. That sure as hell killed my smile good. The music of Byron Bay wasn’t too memorable (except Ozomatli—they are really fucking dope live), but the good times will forever remain in my heart.
9. Joe Strummer Tribute Night in Toyama (Toyama City, Japan, 2006). On the fourth anniversary of Joe Strummer’s death, I found myself in Toyama, the small rural area of Japan where I had taught English for 2 years. In the summer of 2006 I moved from Toyama to Kanagawa—a large step up (I was now striking distance from Tokyo). However, come Christmas time, I missed my old little Japanese shtettle, and I went back for a week to visit my friends. One friend from my jiu-jitsu dojo was very into music, and he invited me to go to a Joe Strummer tribute night being held in a studio on the fourth floor of some random building (in Japan, the best shit is always on the fourth floor of some random building). We ate some tripe ramen and then went to the show. Arriving just as the first band was playing “Safe European Home”, I noticed that everybody was sitting around on stools, so I sat down, bummed a cigarette from my friend (because everyone was smoking), and took it all in. There were 6 bands in total, 3 from Toyama and 3 from nearby Ishikawa, all playing all Clash (except for one band that also played some Mescalaros). Nearly all of the bands were decked out in full-on Clash-era rockabilly gear (duck’s asses and all), and a few of the bands had a bit of choreography going on. It wasn’t really a concert, in that the only people in the studio were the band members and their girlfriends, but all in all it was a great time, and thinking back on it, it reminds me one of the things I love the most about Japan—the beauty of a group of people devoted to a random subculture with the perfect amount of enthusiasm and passion to make it all click together. BONUS: One of the bands was called “Crash City Fuckers.”
8. They Might Be Giants (San Francisco, 1992). This was my first concert ever, and there’s nothing quite like your first time (except, in this case, the seven concerts that appear below this one, but that is neither here nor there). TMBG entered the mainstream in 1990 when they dropped Flood, and my sister became a huge fan, which, at that time, meant that I also became a huge fan. By the time Apollo 18 came out in 1992, I had memorized and analyzed every word of every TMBG song to date (and that includes the songs on Miscellaneous T, the oft-neglected remix album). I went with my buddy, and his dad helped us navigate the Tenderloin to the Great American Music Hall (I saw my first concert and my first trans hooker in the same night!). The Young Fresh Fellows opened up (yes…as in “She doesn’t have to have her Young Fresh Fellows tape back”…they’re a real band), and somebody in the audience stole the lead guitar player’s mike. The crowd was very friendly, and helped my friend and I push to the front in time for the Johns to take to the stage. I don’t remember the entire set list, but they definitely busted out “Birdhouse in Your Soul”, “The Guitar”, “Mammal”, and a fun version of “Lie Still Little Bottle” where John banged a beam of wood against a cafeteria tray in place of the snapping. I outgrew TMBG shortly after I started high school, and that was fine—the beauty of TMBG is that while many music acts target teen angst, TMBG was really trying to hit on the angst of the 10-15 crowd, and I thank them for helping me get through those rough years, at least until I replaced them with the Kurts Cobain and Vonnegut.
7. O Rappa (Salvador, 2007). In 2007, in between two teaching stints in a small university in Kanagawa, I took the pension refund I got from two years of teaching on JET and went to Brazil for nearly two months. I explored Sao Paolo, hung out on the beaches of Floripa, hit up Rio for Carnival, took a riverboat on the Amazon, and eventually made my way down to Salvador, where I met up with a friend who had lived in Brazil a couple of years earlier. He had clued me into O Rappa before, and they quickly became my favorite Brazilian band (and I love Brazilian music, so that’s saying a lot). My first night in Salvador, they just happened to be playing, and my friend just happened to score us tickets. We walked to the arena, a journey that included an attempted mugging from a group of very scary 8 year-olds high on airplane glue, and eventually found our way in and to our seats, which were pretty far up front. They played all of their best hits, and the show just all-around rocked. Since you may not know the band, here’s one of my favorite O Rappa songs:
6. DJ Kyoko/Hifana (Tokyo, 2011). Many years ago, I flew into Israel and rescued a frightened Japanese woman who spoke no English or Hebrew and was getting the third degree from security at Ben Gurion Airport. It ends up that she’s a fairly well-known Tokyo DJ, and we became friends. Years later, when I returned to Japan for some lawyering, she invited me to one of her shows, where she happened to be opening up for Hifana. If you’ve never heard of Hifana, then you need to remedy this ASAP. Of all of the Japanese extreme electronic Hip-Hop DJs (and there’s a big scene for that over there, as you can well imagine), they are the kings. I always appreciate it when a band that sounds great in the studio is able to add a new dimension to their music live, and Hifana more than delivered in that department. Check it out:
Fucking rad, right?
5. Lollapallooza 3 (Mountain View, 1993). Some of y’all may be too young to remember this, but before Lollapallooza was strictly a Chi-town thing, the whole shebang toured around the country, and always made a stop at Shoreline Amphitheatre. I went with 2 buddies in the summer between 6th and 7th grade. The line-up that year was amazing: Rage Against the Machine (before their first album came out…and they sucked! Zach read from the Communist Manifesto for 20 minutes), Front 242, Babes in Toyland, Arrested Development (possibly the best act of the day), Fishbone (complete with Angelo nudity), Dinosaur Jr., Alice in Chains, and Primus. Remember when Primus was the dopest band ever? Did they ever have any popularity outside of the Bay Area? And did they ever have a single female fan? That Les Claypool was one odd dude. I walked around barefoot all day, and severely burned the bottoms of my feet when I walked on the asphalt to the T-shirt stand. Still, one helluva show for a 12 year-old to witness.
4. George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars (New York City, 2004). I’ve seen George and Co. a few times over the years, but the most memorable time was my senior year of college, when I went with a buddy who, like me, was a die hard funk fan. Senior year of college was such an amazing time in my life—going out and getting wasted with my friends at least 5 nights a week, taking interesting-but-pointless classes (“History of Horror Films” was a favorite), and in general, trying to squeeze in as much enjoyment as possible before entering the “real world” (which, incidentally, I wouldn’t enter for another 6 years after college). The George show just kind of played into all of that carefree enjoyment. The show was at B.B. King’s, which, despite being in Times Square, is a great venue—very intimate and fun. George put on one insane show, and Eddie Hazel, the Nose, and that Indian chick who sings in that incredible high voice were all there on stage, along with probably 20 others (sadly, no Bootsy). They played both Parliament and Funkadelic tracks, tearing the shit out of both. I absolutely should have been around in the 70s, but since I wasn’t, this show was the next best thing.
3. Pharcyde (Los Angeles, 2009). “Imani Booty Brown Fatlip and Slim Kid Trey, we do it this way, we do it this way.” My sister put “Passin’ Me By” on a mixtape (as in, an actual cassette tape with a mix on it) she made for me in middle school. I listened to it over and over again (I was a master of the rewind button), and eventually got the entire Bizarre Ride album. My two best friends and I used to listen to it on repeat, until we memorized every word of every song. For years after that, we’d get drunk and just sing the entire album, from start to finish—I think I probably still can do that. Flash forward 15 years. I’m chilling in my Hollywood apartment, studying some IP law, when a friend notifies me that Pharcyde is playing at the Key Club that night. He can’t go, and I can’t find anybody else to join me, so I just go by myself. It’s the first time in years that the original band is back together, and they stuck mainly to Bizarre Ride and Labcabin (because let’s face it, all of their other albums kinda sucked). The audience was almost entirely dudes my age who had been obsessed with Bizarre Ride back in middle school, and you’d better believe we were all singing along with every song. I guess the band members were all in their late 30s (or early 40s?!), but they were still as energetic as ever. Remember, they got their start as dancers on In Living Color, so they have no problem bouncing around. The whole thing was surreal and incredible—well worth the 15-year wait.
2. Pixies (Los Angeles, 2009). The Pixies came to town about a month after the Pharcyde. Talk about being worth the wait! I first really got into the Pixies after they were already broken up, in the early ‘90s. The Pixies got me through high school…and college…and most of life after that. They’re just so fucking profoundly raw and awesome. I’m not sure how else to describe them. Anyway, my senior year of college they got back together and played Coachella, and a bunch of my friends who had never heard of the Pixies before Fight Club went, and it pissed the hell out of me. I missed the Pixies consistently for the next 5 years, until I finally got to see them in their Doolittle Tour. That was when they just went on stage and played Doolittle from front to back, with B-sides before and after, and at my show, an encore set with most of the songs from Come On Pilgrim. During “Into the White”, I happen to peer over at a girl standing next to me who was texting her friend. She wrote, “Pixies is rocking my world. I feel like I’ve been fucked hard and left out to dry.” That pretty much summed it up.
1. Phish (Mountain View, September 30, 1995). I put the date in there because some hardcore Phishheads may know that show—it was the opener of the famous 1995 chess game, and is generally recognized as one heckuva show. Let’s get the record straight here: I no longer listen to Phish. While I acknowledge that they are talented musicians, I’m no longer into the “jam band” sound, and lyrically they are utterly pathetic. To think I used to get really excited about songs about nipular paper cuts and mudrat detectors (ribbon reflectors, penile erectors, etc.) makes me smirk now and want to punch 14 year-old me in the face, but from the summer before 8th grade (when I was introduced to the band at Jew camp) through my junior year of high school, I was legitimately obsessed with the band. I’d collect tapes of their shows (which is what Phishheads do), and bought Phish books, was down with the “secret language”, received Doniac Schvice regularly…you get the idea (and if you don’t, that’s probably for the better). At the time of this show, Phish was unequivocally my favorite band, and seeing them live was literally a life-changing experience. I’m not just saying that–I consider September 30, 1995, to be a turning point in my life—the night I decided to be a free spirit. Everything interesting I have done in my life—my travels, my writing, my philosophical meanderings, my appreciation for art, my obscure tastes in everything, my beliefs in the liberal cause—all of this can be traced back to that Phish show. Was I sober at the time? Uh, no. But that’s largely irrelevant. Kind of. Although I only listen to Phish now on rare occasion, mainly for comedic or nostalgic purposes, I will never forget the impact the band had on my life, that one night in Mountain View. And if I ever want to re-live that magical experience, the magic of the internet (and unabashed copyright infringement) allows me to do so:
So there you have it. One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to go to at least one live show every month (the fact that I didn’t do that last year is pathetic). If you’re around in the Bay Area, please drag me out!
I went hiking with a buddy last weekend who requested that, for my next post, I do something less autobiographical and more universal. He also requested that I “pontificate.” That was the verb he used. So now, my old friend, I hope you’re reading this (and knowing me, I’ll probably send you a personal emailing insisting that you do read it…and then I’ll quiz you later to make sure you actually did), just for you, I will pontificate on something that is universal: getting older. And just because I like alienating people, I’m going to narrow the scope of my audience just a bit by actually pontificate on getting older…if you’re between the ages of, I don’t know, 30 and 33? No, let’s make it 30 and 34, so I can include my sister.
But let me start with an autobiographical story (ha! sucker!). A couple of weeks ago I went to New York to attend two weddings. I did manage to squeeze in coffee in Chelsea with my dear friend Eddie (I don’t actually drink coffee, but you get the idea. I think I had lemonade and some kind of pastry). Eddie, screenwriting teacher extraordinaire, is the only professor from Columbia with whom I keep in touch. On nearly all of my annual pilgrimages to NY I meet with him for brunch, lunch or coffee, and our conversation usually focuses on movies, his newest play (he’s kind of been shifting recently from screenwriter to playwright), or my traveling adventures. This time, however, when I met with Eddie, he was truly distraught.
“J, thank G-d you’re here. I’ve been needing to talk to you. I’ve been so confused lately.”
“Eddie, what’s wrong?”
“It’s this new TV show, Girls. Have you seen it?” I had not…and I still have not. He continued, “a friend of mine told me to watch it, and now I’m entirely screwed up. Is this what young people are like? The show is about these over-privileged white women in their early-mid twenties, and I need you to tell me if this is a generational thing–generic ‘romantic angst’ about how empty, meaningless, joyless, mechanical, disappointing, and unfulfilling it all is–blow jobs, dope, threesomes, looking for Mr. Right in a world full of creeps and jerks, being a ‘professional’ working woman and a child still dependent on her parents for money, love, understanding, and sympathy? When I was in my twenties–” (I’ll pause for a second to tell you that Eddie was in his twenties quite some time before I was born) “we were adults. After you finished college you got a job and supported yourself, you weren’t allowed to take two or five or ten years to ‘find yourself’ or whatever these young women and men think they’re doing. Is this what it is like now?”
Yes Eddie, welcome to the year 2012. What was once called “Peter Pan Syndrome” is now called “gaining valuable life experience.” Actually, I just Wikipedia’d the show and it ends up that, although it received near universal acclaim, some guy on Gawker described it as “a television program about the children of wealthy famous people and shitty music and Facebook and how hard it is to know who you are and Thought Catalog and sexually transmitted diseases and the exhaustion of ceaselessly dramatizing your own life while posing as someone who understands the fundamental emptiness and narcissism of that very self-dramatization.” There you go Eddie—get rid of the “children of wealthy famous people” and you have my generation in a nutshell. G-d, I’m sorry.
I had dinner with another friend the other night who is a fan of the show and confirmed that both Eddie and Gawker are correct, but added that it’s important for us, as a society, to watch this show, so that we understand how pathetic we are. Is that really what we need? Some kind of wake-up call alerting us to the fact that our generation sucks? Have we not figured that one our on our own?
Also, have any of you guys ever read that blog “Fuck! I’m in my Twenties”? I think it’s supposed to be the blog version of Girls. It’s this feisty New York Jewess making little cartoons about how boys are noncommittal and it makes her sad. I really want to grab her shoulders and shake her and say “why don’t you just date a guy who’s mature? For fuck’s sake!” But then she wouldn’t have anything to write about.
The author of that blog is the same age as the girls in Girls—somewhere around 24. It’s a scary time, the early 20s, or at least it is for some. You’re out of college so lose that structure, and many people kick and scream to avoid any sort of responsibility. You’re still nervous about dating and sex (don’t try to pretend that you weren’t). You’re incredibly arrogant, even though you’re barely comfortable in your own skin. And now, there’s a new important element to being 24, apparently—you’re also unemployed, and so you’re reliant on your folks to cover the rent, just one rent increase away from moving back in with them. And of course, if Girls has taught us anything, your parents are also rich, so that helps. The unemployment aspect wasn’t part of it when I was 24, but it looks like it is now the norm. I have a lot of sympathy for college grads these days. I mean, those college grads that didn’t STUDY SCIENCE AND MATH LIKE I TOLD YOU TO! IF YOU HAD DONE THAT, YOU’D HAVE A JOB RIGHT NOW—TRUST ME. ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS WHO DID COMP SCI ARE NOW EMPLOYED, DO YOU NOT SEE THAT? But nobody listens to me. [Note: I’ve now seen a numberofstudies that don’t rank math, CS and science majors as highly on the non-unemployment scale as I would have hoped. They’re still better than most of the arts and humanities (although theology seems to be good for getting employed(?)), but your odds of getting a job with a “STEM” degree still aren’t as good as I’d like to think. So let me qualify that last statement by just saying that I have a lot of sympathy for college grads today, because they’re fucked.]
Of course, this is not relevant to me, or you if you were in my elementary/middle school/year course/college/JET class, because we’re all in our 30s. If I had any artistic talent, or if my handwriting was remotely legible, I’d make my own version of that blog and call it “Fuck yeah, I’m in my Thirties, bitch!” Being in my 30s is awesome. When I was on the verge of turning 30, one of my older cousins (in her…older than 30s), said that your 30s are much better than your 20s, because once you turn 30, you stop giving a fuck what other people think of you. I think we can all agree that truer words have rarely been spoken. I mean, other than at work, where I’m constantly terrified of what the partners and of counsel and senior associates and mid-level associates and pretty much everybody else thinks of me, I totally don’t give a fuck (and let’s disregard, for a moment, the fact that I spend nearly all of my waking hours at work).
So what does it mean to be in your 30s? Well sheeit, I probably don’t need to tell you, but here it goes: Being in your 30s means…
1. Not having to buy all of your furniture from IKEA. Granted, I bought my desk, coffee table, TV table, kitchen table, and little kitchen stand (for the microwave, toaster and rice cooker) from IKEA, and my dresser was a hand-me-down from my sister, but I bought a damn amazing couch from this place and it was really expensive and I love it! I’m sitting on it right now, and now I’m going to lie down on it as I watch an episode of Breaking Bad because apparently season 4 is now on Netflix, so it looks like I’ll continue this blog later.
2. Being able to at least pretend that you have your shit together. Most of us have achieved some level of financial sustainability. Many of us are done with school, now doing something related to a career, not just a job. Many of you are married. Some of you have kids. On paper, this makes us look like “adults,” which is helpful for finding new, better jobs and people to date (or marry, as the case may be), getting mortgages, and making our parents proud. But let’s face it—we still have no idea what the fuck we’re doing. I suppose the idea is to “fake it ‘til you make it”…but when do you really “make it”? I think of my dad. He’s 70 and retired. He spends a lot of time sitting in his super-comfy easy chair, reading at least 1-2 books and watching 3-4 movies every week. When he’s not in his chair, he’s hiking through beautiful, mountainous wilderness in Europe with my mom or riding his bike through the Rockies with his biking buddies. He spends a ton of time with this grandson, who completely loves him, and he cooks and takes photography classes for fun. And during all of this, my mom is still working and supporting him. In other words, my dad has officially “made it”. So I only have 39 years to go.
3. Getting to be bitter, cranky old men and women. “When I was your age, we listened to music on cassette tapes. If you didn’t like a song, you couldn’t just click a button to skip it, you had to fast forward and time it exactly, or else you accidentally skipped the next song too!” Or, “when I was your age, Star Wars was a series with Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia. There was no Jar-Jar Binks, for Pete’s sake!” Or, finally, “When I was your age, there was no Internet pornography. If you wanted some visual age for when you were ‘crackin’ the whip on ol’ Jebediah,’ you had to steal a decade-old Playboy from the barbershop or your creepy uncle, or you had to pay the drunk homeless guy in front of Quick Stop to go in and buy you a nudie mag, and you had to trust his judgment to pick a good one! And if you didn’t like the girls in whatever pictures you managed to scrounge together, you closed your damn eyes and used your imagination! Yeah, that’s right, kids used to have imaginations! Before they were destroyed from watching all the TV with the Mighty Rootin-Tootin’ Rangers and your Pokey-mans or whatever the hell you call them!”
We also get to have all sorts of minor old-age problems, like agonizing hangovers, gray hair, hair loss (a touchy subject with this author), and a little bit of unwanted weight gain. It’s fun to sit around talking about how we’re becoming geriatric. The other day, a friend of mine turned 27 and complained about how she was “getting old”, and I just shook my head. Kids. And although we’re “getting old,” we’re still young enough that we don’t need to have routine prostate examinations. That’s a good thing.
4. Knowing what we want—at least in terms of looking for potential mates. When I was a dumb kid in my 20s, I wanted a girl who was a half-Japanese, half-Brazilian supermodel with a Ph. D. and a really amazing ass, who was an excellent cook and loved the Giants and had heard of all of my music, and who was really kind and inspiring, and who was Jewish. This was all silly—the perfect woman like the one I described doesn’t exist, and even if she did, these are all things that look good on paper, but in real life she’d probably be lame. I genuinely thought that this was what I wanted, and would settle for nothing less. Now that I’m a few years older and seemingly wiser, I know that I was almost completely off. At the age of 31, I now know what qualities would make the perfect mate: I am looking for a woman who can tolerate me for more than an hour or so. And who has a really amazing ass.
5. No longer being so fucking dumb. Have you noticed how kids in their 20s are super fucking dumb? When they talk, they actually use phrases like “OMG” and “totes” (the first is short for “oh my G-d” and the second is, I believe, short for “totally”) in speech. I once heard a girl in her 20s say “LOL” in response to something funny. “LOL” stands for “laughing out loud.” If I understand correctly, “LOL” is something you type when you’re talking on the IM and your friend says something funny, and you want to indicate to your friend that what he said was so funny that you’re actually laughing out loud. In real life, when somebody says something that’s so funny that it makes you laugh out loud, you indicate this by actuallylaughing. The whole thing reminds me of that “IM Me” song that came out when we were in college, back when AIM was all the rage. I couldn’t find the actual video for the song, but I found this mock video from collegehumor.com, a website devoted to “college humor”:
[Note: For some reason, I’m having trouble getting the video to embed itself properly, so if you can’t see it and you really want to for some reason (and I don’t necessarily recommend it), you can try clicking here.]
Speaking of which, people in their 20s are so fucking dumb that they find “college humor” amusing. I remember back when I was in my 20s, I once sent a friend of mine in his 30s a video clip that I thought was funny. He informed me that it was “college humor,” and objectively not funny. He was right. Totes.
6. As my cousin said, no longer giving a fuck what people think about you. Did #5 above piss off any of you fair readers who are in your 20s? Well you know what they say: it’s better to be pissed off than pissed on. Actually, that’s not necessarily true in all situations. Trust me–you’ll understand when you’re in your 30s, and you’re no longer too prude and embarrassed to explore your deepest carnal desires.
But unabashedly exploring your inner ecstasies is just part of the fun. Once you’re in your 30s, you don’t need to worry about being cool. It’s simply not something that matters anymore. That is why, when it’s cold and I don’t want to wear shoes, I have no shame in wearing my sandals with socks, even though numerous people claim this is a fashion faux pas. It’s not like wearing socks with sandals is going to prevent me from getting laid. My glaring personality faults, on the other hand…
7. Being able to be nostalgic for the 80s and even the 90s. This is kind of the flip-side of #3. About a month ago, I had a week in whicyh two completely unrelated people in my life used the phrase “Zack Morris phone.” Also, can I get a hell yeah for Calvin and Hobbes? And the Far Side? And the Pharcyde? I can still rap pretty much their entire first album, and I know some of you can too. The other night I saw the new Batman movie with a couple of friends who are also in their 30s, and we were reminiscing about Michelle Pfeifer, and how at the time, her Catwoman was as sexy as sexy could be. Although, I gotta say, Anne Hathaway’s ass in the newest Batman is something else. Do you think she could tolerate me for more than an hour or so?
8. Realizing that you’re not going to write the Great American Novel by the time you’re 30—because you’re past 30 and you still haven’t written it—and being okay with it. When you’re in your 20s, you worry that you need to have accomplished all sorts of shit by the time you’re 30. You need to have gotten married, bought a house, had a kid, made your first million, become a household name, saved the world. Then you turn 30, you realize you haven’t done any of that, and you know what—well, I think this scene from the classic summer camp hit Meatballs says it all:
OMG that scene totes makes me LOL and PMP.
Alright kiddies, I think this post is long enough. If you’ve graced the planet with your presence for over 3 decades, get down with yo’ bad 30-something year old self. And don’t forget—you are fucking hot. If you’re not there yet, don’t worry, some day you will be, and then you will understand the true meaning of the phrase “totally tits”, as used when describing the awesomeness of your 30-something year old existence.
As always, thanks for reading. I should let you guys know now that I’m taking a hiatus from this blog for a month or two to focus on some other creative endeavors, but if you need a pep talk on getting older, you can always reach me at sfloveaffair@gmail.com (or my normal gmail address or through facebook or on my cell phone).
If we count my posts on stalking and pretty girls, then this will be the third post in four that is somehow related to romance/women. The problem is that I haven’t posted in a few weeks and in that period nearly all that I’ve been doing is working and dating, and do you really want a post about the former? “Today I read software license agreements for 6 hours then spent the next 4 writing and re-writing a single paragraph in a professional service contract having to do with the ownership of intellectual property rights for developed works. I also bought a snickers bar from the vending machine on the 32nd floor.” Does that sound interesting to you? Do you want to read more? Or would you rather read about me having awkward conversations with hot women at relatively expensive restaurants? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
The truth is that after my initial grieving period (which lasted for…let’s not say), I ascertained that the only way to exorcise the remnants of the pain my ex caused me from my system and to once again find my happy place was to find a new female obsession. As Dorothy Parker once said, “The best way to get over a man is to get under a new one.” Was that actually Dorothy Parker? Maybe Mae West? I can’t find the correct source on the Google. Well, the same advice essentially applies to getting over women (note: alternative positioning may apply, but that’s a matter of personal preference). In Japan, dating was not really an option for me, due to lack of time and interest in Japanese women. However, a friend did suggest that I join an online dating site while I was in Japan to “plant some seeds” (his words, not mine) with women in SF for when I got home.
And plant I did! Kind of. It wasn’t very effective—I initially joined match.com when I had over 2 months left in Japan, and then my stint got extended an extra month, and believe it or not, a lot of women didn’t want to wait that long to meet me. I’d have a few initial emails back-and-forth with a woman, and then she’d want to know why I hadn’t asked her out on a date yet. “Well actually, I’m in Japan on business right now.” “Oh, well when do you get back?” “In 6 weeks.” And that would be the end of that.
I will admit that this subscription to match.com was not my first foray into the exciting and hilarious world of Internet dating. Initially I was against it. After all, for a long time, there was quite a stigma against using the world wide web to find romance. What man is so pathetic that he can’t meet someone in real life and has to resort to a machine? I’m sure that back when Internet dating first started, these sites were populated with a number of depraved, unattractive 40 year-old virgins who believed that they would score with hot 20-somethings through the power of computers: “If a computer can beat Kasperov in chess, then maybe it’s smart enough to get me laid.”
I believed this for a while, but my views on the whole thing were changed when a fellow English teacher in Japan showed me an autobiographical story she had written about meeting a much older man on the Internet and having a very steamy encounter. This English teacher, by the way, was a total babe. Some creepy old dude had somehow used his computing box to woo her (did I mention that the encounter was totally steamy? I think I did, but it’s worth repeating. “Steamy” is such a great word to describe encounters). I asked her about meeting men online, and she said that in New York it was all the rage; she and all of her hot girlfriends were all about it. This was in 2004, which was a while ago, but bear in mind that New York has always been on the forefront of sweeping cultural phenomena.
My first Internet-related romantic experience did not come from a traditional dating website, but rather from hospitalityclub.org, which is basically the same as couchsurfer.com—if you’re traveling to a foreign city, you can use these sites to find people who will host you for free, take you out, show you around…basically, it’s the best way to travel, period. When I went to Brazil for two months, I used it to meet friends and find free lodging in Sao Paulo, Floripa, Rio (including a free place to stay during Carnival, when hostels were charging $50 a night for a spot in a 12-bed dorm room), and Salvador. When I got to Olinda, I met a girl who lived with her family and couldn’t host me, but wanted to meet for dinner. She had posted a small pic on the site (it’s not an online dating site where you’re trying to advertise your wares) so I didn’t really know what she looked like. I rang the doorbell of her house and a pretty cute girl answered. I was about to introduce myself when she said, “oh, you’re here for my sister.” The sister came out, and I was completely blown away by how smoking hot she was. We went out for sushi and beer. A lot of beer. The next morning I woke up naked in a dirty hotel room with a pounding hangover and an empty wallet (note: not because she had robbed me, but because I had blown a very large stack of Reais at the sushi/beer place). Anyhow, that was my first experience with the amorous power of the Internet. And, for that matter, fake boobs.
My second Internet “dating” experience also did not come from a dating site, but from a wonderful site you may have once frequented called myspace.com. This was really my ultimate fantasy come to life: through myspace, a cute girl found my blog (my Xanga-based Japan page) and fell in love with it, and then wanted to meet me in person. She moved to SF a week before Thanksgiving my 1L year, and when I went home for that holiday we met up. We ended up dating a bit, until, among other things, she realized that my blog persona was way more awesome than the real me. To all of the ladies out there reading this, let the record show that this was 5 years ago, and now the real me has caught up with my blog persona and is a catch. A total catch, according to my sister.
I dabbled some more in Internet dating when I was in law school. I had already hit somewhat of a dating stride in at the time, possessing a good deal of undeserved confidence from three years of “dating training wheels” with cute Japanese girls. However, meeting women was sometimes difficult in LA, and because I was already spending so much goddamn time in front of my computer, using the Internet to find women seemed like the natural approach to combating the loneliness and emptiness that came with being a law student. Being a poor law student/cheap Jew (am I allowed to say that? I think I’m allowed to say that), I didn’t want to pay money to join a dating site, so I went with the obvious dating site choice for the budget would-be-Romeo: craigslist.com.
I would probably never admit that to anybody, but fortunately this blog is 100% anonymous, and none of my readers know me personally, so I have nothing to fear. Oh, wait. Without giving any details, I will tell you all that I met some very interesting and beautiful young women on craigslist.
People no longer use craigslist for dating, ever since some psychotic asshole discovered that the highly anonymous nature of the site could allow you to meet an innocent and somewhat naïve young woman who has no idea who you are and murder her. I haven’t been on for a while, but I believe they got rid of the “casual encounters” option completely and I don’t think anybody uses the normal dating option anymore. It’s partly because of the murders, but also because of the advent of the greatest dating website ever, okcupid.com (a.k.a. OKC).
If you are single, I highly recommend you join OKC. You can use it free of charge and it has all of these fun surveys and quizzes that are technically for finding compatible partners, but usually have the actual effect of eliciting chortles (and I’ve mentioned before how much I love the eliciting of chortles). Nearly everybody who is on another pay dating website (match, J-date, eHarmony, adultfriendfinder, etc.) is also on OKC, as a sort of backup. After all, there is a reason they call it “sexonthefirstdate.com” (and by “they” I mean “I”). By joining OKC, you’re letting the online date-o-sphere know that you’re not serious enough about finding your soul mate that you’re willing to spend money in the effort, but you are single and ready to mingle (and by “mingle” I mean “make whoopee”). OKC also has a place in my heart because it was created by the guys that do Sparknotes (for whom I did a bit of freelance work in college), and the huge volume of users and statistical information in their online dating behaviors has led to the advent of OKtrends, which I think is the one of the most unique and interesting insights into cultural trends, romance, sexuality, race, and society in general that the Internet has to offer.
But I’m not on OKC. I am, however, on match.com, and I’m super-proud of my utterly brilliant profile page:
Tagline: “We’ll tell my mother we met on J-Date.
About me and what I’m looking for: My earliest memory in life is of my third birthday. There’s a huge present that’s practically bigger than me, and it’s covered in blue wrapping paper with dinosaurs on it. I unwrap the present to reveal a Fisher Price record player and all of the later-era Beatles records (from Revolver to Let it Be). Also, I’m completely naked.
That sort of set the tone for the next 28 years.
I’m Bay Area born and bred but I’ve lived on the east coast, in the middle east, in the far east, and down under. I own a car but I prefer to walk or ride my bike everywhere. I’d describe myself as devastatingly handsome, utterly brilliant, heartwarmingly magnanimous, and above all, unbelievably modest. I am in love with the city of San Francisco and know her and some of her secrets very well–I promise you that no matter how long you have lived here, I can show you something new. On the flip side, this city and the area are constantly evolving and there’s much that I still don’t know, so I’m always happy to learn something new.
My passions in life include music, the environment, charity,* travel, and sarcasm, and I take all of these things very, very seriously. Other interests include ethnic food, math, snowboarding, movies, and irony. I love arguing, but I believe the purpose of this manner of discourse is to educate and, more importantly, to be educated, not to persuade or “win”. I have tattoos. I’m a feminist.** I speak English when I’m sober but become trilingual after a few beers.
I’m looking for a woman who is not boring. Someone who is willing to go slightly out of her comfort zone, and to pull me, kicking and screaming, out of mine. Women who are conservative in politics or in life need not apply (although being financially conservative is acceptable). If you’re passionate about something–anything, that is a huge plus. If we share common interests, that’s good. If we can introduce each other to new interests, that’s great. Also, I have this awesome idea for a date that I really want to try. I call you and tell you to put on your fanciest dress. Then I pick you up at your place, blindfold you, and take you someplace special. This isn’t a first date type of thing, don’t worry. I’m not going to tell you where I end up taking you but you’re gonna totally love it. *I’m not just saying this to get laid. **Not this either.
For Fun: Many of my favorite activities involve music: going to live jazz shows in what would probably be smokey bars (but for the CA smoking laws, which I support), dancing (albeit badly), karaoke, making mix tapes (er, CDs), singing in the shower, etc.
Favorite Hot Spots: I’ve traveled all over the world, and Brazil is my favorite country. In SF, my favorite bar is Dada on 2nd, my favorite restaurant is either Kokkari or Metro Caffe, and my favorite secret spots will remain secrets until you ask very nicely.
Favorite Things (note: this is the one I’m most proud of): Perfume and stockings and sweet tattooed ladies, Simpsons and Star Wars and hits from the eighties, Giants and Niners with championship rings, these are a few of my favorite things.
Admit it, you totally want to date me. As my female friend pointed out (you’d better believe I had several female friends review my profile before posting), it’s good for filtering out dumb girls. It also gives women who want to message me many “hooks” for something to write about—I’ve received messages referring to sarcasm, feminism, charity, tattoos, and the desire to know of my SF secrets. Here’s one for all of you loyal readers: Kingdom of Dumpling on 27th and Taraval. Just go there. Trust me.
Unfortunately, men are expected to be the initiators in the match.com world (at least in SF…from what I understand, it’s different in NY), so having a brilliant profile don’t mean jack diddly squat if you can’t write a decent opening message. In her first week on match.com, a woman’s thumbnail (yes, you browse through thumbnails) has a “NEW!” legend on it. If she’s moderately attractive, she’ll receive between 100 and 300 messages (literally triple that in NY), so yours has to stand out or she’ll never reply. I will now tell you my tried and true tips for getting women to respond.
Tip 1: come up with a witty subject line—not just “hello” or “hey”
Tip 2: don’t use the same cut and pasted message for each woman to whom you write
Tip 3: use correct spelling, grammar and punctuation
Tip 4: actually read her profile and comment on aspects of it you find interesting. If you don’t find anything in her profile interesting, don’t write to her. Even if she’s really hot.
Tip 5: Ask questions to give her something to write about. I end most of my opening messages with these three:
1. What’s the last concert you attended?
2. What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?
3. Whom would you rather do: Indiana Jones or Han Solo?
Number 1 and number 2 are sort of space fillers; number 3 is the important one. The correct answer is Han Solo, because I find myself to resemble him more than Indy. Sadly, very few women get this question right. Many say, “Indiana Jones, because intelligence is soooo sexy!” However, saying this just displays one’s ignorance. Yes, Indiana Jones was a bad-ass with a whip and also was a distinguished professor, but are we forgetting that before he was a smuggler, Han Solo graduated at the top of his class from the Imperial Academy (the West Point of the far, far away galaxy) and was slated to be some kind of high-up admiral, but then saw how the Empire was destroying the Wookie population on Kashyyyk, refused to kill and rescued Chewie, and was kicked out of the Imperial Navy and forced into exile? (Note: I learned this important tidbit of information from the Star Wars Encyclopedia, which I read cover to cover many, many times). Han Solo is brilliant, brave, and noble—anybody who’s anybody knows that. Admit it, you totally want to date me.
Let me say one thing about Internet dating, to debunk a popular myth: nearly every woman I have met through the Internet has been more physically attractive in real life than in her pictures. Yes, you read that correctly. There has been more than one occasion when my jaw dropped slightly when I first met a woman, thinking “whoah whoah whoah, you are way too hot, why the hell did you post those crappy pics?” It occurs to me that I might simply not like the way women look in photographs. I’ve felt that nearly every woman I’ve dated has been uncommonly non-photogenic—maybe it’s just me.
But I digress. A buddy of mine once said that on match.com, you may not find the love of your life, but at least you’ll get a great story or two. As much as I love great stories, I’d be much more honored to be part of somebody else’s tale of Internet romance hilarity. Here’s the story of my first match.com date, from the woman’s point of view:
“I met J at a café in the lower Haight near his apartment. I immediately noticed that he was devastatingly handsome. I’m talking hot. His good looks more than made up for the fact that he had spent the past month correcting all of my grammatical mistakes and typos in our email correspondence. Anywho [note: this woman did actually use the word ‘anywho’ in emails], we ordered our drinks, and the barrista said to J, “oh my, she is so beautiful—is she your girlfriend?” to which he replied, “I wish! I just met her—this is our first date. Match.com—whoulda thunk?” Who the hell says that to a barrista? There was a loud jazz band in the café, so J suggested we go for a walk to the park nearby. That was cool with me—I like parks. It ends up that the park J had in mind was a GIANT HILL. Don’t got me wrong, I’m in shape—I do yoga and spinning 4 days a week, but I was wearing my flip-flops and jeans and not ready for hardcore exercise on a first date. So he made me walk up this hill, in this “park”, where the only other people were homeless people, dirty hippies, and dirty homeless hippies, and by the time we finally got to the top and I was drenched in sweat, which he probably thought was hilarious. Some guy was there with a beautiful greyhound, and J didn’t seem too excited, which was lame because he had said he loved dogs (and yes, I do say “must love dogs” on my profile). We talked up at the top for a bit, and then J took me down probably the steepest route (hell on my knees—and did I mention that I was wearing flip-flops?). As we were near the park exit, we walked through a clearing and J tugged at my arm and pointed to a couple he saw where the girl was going down on the guy in the middle of the freaking park! Thanks J, I really needed to see that! We finally got back to the car and he wanted to give me a hug, even though I was covered in sweat. Who the hell is this guy? I definitely will not be seeing him again.”
I hope she’s doing well; she was a sweet girl.
While I admit that the Internet is not the best place to find love, the truth is that, with the amount I work, it’s really hard to meet women. I don’t have time to do regular activities and I don’t go to synagogue. What are the other options?
Getting set up by friends. A few of my friends have offered to set me up with their friends, but the truth is that this can create a very high-pressure, uncomfortable situation. What if the date doesn’t go well? Then it will just be awkward when you all hang out together. I did go on one friend-of-a-friend date. I am not that close to the mutual friend, and she lives far away anyway, so I didn’t fear any post-date awkwardness. This friend doesn’t know me all too well, and I think her logic was “you’re a Jewish lawyer, my friend is a Jewish lawyer, clearly you two were made for each other!” On the date, I asked the woman what she liked to do when she wasn’t lawyering. She answered, “lately, I’ve been really into going to my friend’s weddings!” Then she told me about said weddings. For an hour. I’m fairly convinced that the second she saw me (this was a true blind date), she decided that she wasn’t attracted to me, and was doing everything in her power to prevent a second date.
Getting set up by family. I have a ton of extended family in the Bay Area, and they all recognize that I am truly the most eligible bachelor in San Francisco. Unfortunately, very few of my family members have any idea about what I’m looking for in a woman, and most of them don’t actually know anything about the women with whom they want to set me up. Case in point: my aunt found a woman she said was perfect for me. As it turns out, said woman is a lesbian. So almost perfect, but not quite.
Meeting in bars. I actually have a couple of friends who have met their spouses in bars, and that’s awesome. Other than the occasional (very rare) one-night stand, I was never good at meeting women in bars. In all of my experiences trying to meet women in bars (and I have an embarrassingly high number of such experiences, considering my actual success), there was only one time I met a woman of quality in a bar whom I ended up dating for more than a night. Of course, I met her in a gay bar. So maybe I should start going to more gay bars?
Meeting at parties. Parties are great places to meet women, because you automatically have an ice breaker: “How do you know [host of party]?” I’ve actually had some decent success in the past with meeting women at parties. Unfortunately, these days I rarely get invited to parties. I can’t imagine why.
I’ve been on a fairly high number of dates the past two months, and I won’t say that all of my dating experiences in that time have been misadventures. I do, in fact, have at least one or two stories worth writing home about. Unfortunately for you, “home” is not the general world at large, so such stories are not going to be shared on this blog. I will say that, after a two month dating bonanza, I think I can chill out a bit. I’m beginning to understand that the Dorothy Parker/Mae West quote (which, by the way, I think may not have actually been penned by either of those women) is malarchy for men (and probably/hopefully for women). I don’t need a woman in my life to achieve happiness, and I’m getting sick of the stress and temporal/monetary expenditure of trying so aggressively to find one. What I’d really like to focus on these days is doing the things that I love, like writing this blog. I’ve also recently had some inspiration for a couple of other creative endeavors that may or may not come into fruition (stay tuned…or not), and I can’t let obsessive dating get in the way of my genius.
Of course, that having been said, if you’re a brilliant, beautiful, interesting, kind-hearted woman who recognizes that Han Solo is way more doable than Indiana Jones, please feel free to email me at sfloveaffair@gmail.com.
P.S. I realize now that I didn’t actually write about having awkward conversations with hot women at expensive restaurants. Oh well. It happened.
