Why I'm screwed

"If you want to be happy, what’s most important is to have lots of friends. Historically, we have often thought that having a small cluster of tight, long-term friends is crucial to being happy. But Christakis and Fowler found that the happiest people in Framingham were those who had the most connections, even if the relationships weren’t necessarily deep ones." — From Clive Thompson's assessment of their research into happiness in the Times Magazine

I just saw Obama's limo

I just saw Obama's limo. I was in the deli when the guy ahead of me in the queue telling a story about someone driving past him with his windows down. "He just saw Obama," explained the cashier when I reached her.
"Really."
"He's in town to speak to Wall Street."
"Wow."
I got out my ipohone, found out that he was due to have lunch with Bill Clinton at Il Mulino, and headed down there. I joined a large crowd on the corner West 3rd and La Guardia place, held back by metal barricades. About three blocks had been closed off. We couldn't see much, just a mass of police cars about a block away, their lights flashing, but the crowd seemed happy to collect, everyone taking turns to tell newcomers what was going on.
"Obama's having lunch."
"Really? Wow."
One woman asks me what was going on.
"Obama's having lunch with Bill Clinton," I tell her.
"Huh. And they didn't ask me," she says and wanders off.
Another guy deadpans, "boring," to laughter, then takes out his camera like everyone else.
Finally there is movement: a helicopter overhead and a phalanx of bodygaurds walking down the street towards us, waving people back from their fire-escapes. The crowd push forward against the barricade. The police cars whoop. There is a flash of sunlight in a window, and a big black limo swings into view... then disappears down Thompson street, a block away. He's not coming out way, after all.
"Oh Obama," said one girl, before walking off.

My first gay wedding

My friends Doug and Michael got married yesterday on Long Island. No, New York has not legalised gay marriage just yet: they got formally hitched in Masachussetts and held another ceremony at a friends house just outside Southampton. It was a big farm house, with a swimming pool, barns and stables, and some bemused-looking horses just next to the field where the ceremony took place. Hmm, I could see them thinking. Two grooms. Never seen that before. Needless to say, there were tears and laughter and kids and speeches and proud parents and bad dancing and great music and drinking and apple pie and some fire-eaters which you don't see every day. Did I feel like the institution of marriage was weakened, or my own marriage in any way threatened? Of course not; it felt strengthened, as it always is when friends of yours go through the same experience as you. If anything, I made me realise how completely stuck for an answer I would be if Doug or Michael or any other of my gay friends asked me the reason that I could get married and they couldn't. I mean honestly. What could I possibly say to them? How would that sentence begin? I'm better than you? Better at sex? Opposite attract? Finders keepers? Really. My head is as empty as a beach-ball. I'm curious: what arguments have people been using?

Americans Observing 9/11 By Trying Not To Masturbate

Cheer up, luv, it might never happen!

"When he picked up a pair of hitchhikers and allowed one of them to drive, the sideways image that he took shows the driver—a dead-eyed ringer for Richard Dreyfuss in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”—in determined profile. Check the contact sheet at the back of the catalogue, and you come across the succeeding frame: same angle, same guy, but now with a definite grin—closer in mood, instantly, to the Dreyfuss who gunned his truck in pursuit of the alien craft, his face lit with chirpy wonder. Then there is the heroine of “The Americans,” an elevator girl from Miami Beach, of whom Jack Kerouac asked, in concluding his introduction to the U.S. edition: "And I say: That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what’s her name & address?" Again, it is worth consulting the relevant contact strip: fourteen shots of the same woman, at least half of them catching her in the act of a smile—a polite gesture adopted for those riding beside her, you might say, but then professional courtesy is no less a national trait than the ruefulness on which Frank preferred to focus" — Anthony Lane, reviewing the Robert Frank exhibition in The New Yorker

I've often wondered whether people in photographs are as miserable as they look. Proper photographs, that is, by proper photographers: the kind who threw a camera in the back of a truck during the great depression and drove down to the dustbowl to take stark black and white pictures of people living stark black-and-white lives. Not your mum's holiday snaps. A few years ago, I was in an airport and there was this guy sitting opposite me in the terminal. He looked sunk in despair, sat there, being ignored by everyone around him, his face wan with the bad lighting. I thought to myself: If I was a photographer, that would make a great image of modern-day alienation and anomie. Then I caught myself, backed up a little, and thought: hang on, how do I really know that guy is miserable. I looked at him again. This time, I tried to imagine him thinking about the nice Turkey dinner that was waiting for him when he got home, his wife, his kids. He might not be showing it on the outside, but it was warming him from the inside. Before I knew it, I couldn't look at him without being convinced he was sitting on the most extraordinary secret. A photograph would never be able to capture it. In fact, a photograph would do the exact opposite: it would suggest he was locked in existential torpor when he wasn't.

And then I thought of all the photographs I've seen — in exhibitions, in books — where I assumed something similar. A sullen young mother during the Great Depression who can only be thinking about what a lousy time it was to have kids. A drag queen in New York during the fifties who just has to be thinking about the difficulties of being a drag queen in fifties New York. A corporate worker on the subway home, staring into his own personal abyss. How do I know they weren't thinking about a turkey dinner, too? Or maybe they were just thinking about the fact that some stranger they didn't know was pointing a camera at them. It doesn't happen every day. The act of being ambushed by a photographer doesn't exactly bring out the best in people. Who pulls on their game face for a stranger? You look back defiantly, sullenly. And as for being photographed on the sly, on the subway home, say, well forget it: who wouldn't look like a corporate worker ant crushed by the wheels of industry?

Ode to joy: The return of Paddy McAloon

“Have you ever seen those documentaries about people who stockpile newspapers and bread and bicycles? I’m a bit like that. I have this massive creative urge, which I struggle with. The desire to write is much stronger than the desire to turn any of them into records. At a certain point it went from being a sort of sensible strategy of laying things away for a long winter and now I’ve got a mountain of junk and music. I feel like someone in an Edgar Allan Poe story, buried under my boxes of albums.

“I have a good family life, I do the school pick up, I have friends. But I am reclusive in a lot of things. I don’t really care for the brave new world. You’re talking to a guy who doesn’t drive. I’m not on the internet. But I don’t think it’s as mad as it looks. If you decide to devote your life to something as an artistic endeavour, you’re doing it cause you think it’s worth doing. Its not some act of grandeur for myself, its more that I can get away with it, and concentrate on the exciting bit, the flowery bit. I feel like when I talk about it, I’m coming from a sensible place. But I know how it makes me sound. Maybe it’s the beard.” — The Daily Telegraph

I've always thought Paddy McAloon had a little Brian Wilson in him. Green Gartside certainly does. I do love my eighties pop perfectionists turned bearded recluses. I tried being a recluse once, living in the middle of the forest outside Woodstock, while I finished a book. But I couldn't hack it. I finished the book, and came to find my trash overflowing with empties. Where was everybody? You can't be a recluse if you're asking yourself that kind of question. So I moved back to the city. It was fun while it lasted.

So. A new Prefab Sprout album. The US open on the TV. A new novel from Lorrie Moore on my bedside table, and new books from Nicholson Baker and Nick Hornby on the way. The memory godawful Norwegian receding in the summer haze. Things are looking up. More than looking up. If one godawful Norwegian trilogy is all I have to pay for a Prefab/Hornby/Nadal happiness trifecta then count me one of God's contented customers.

How To tips on heckling

So Joe Wilson has decided to introduce British style heckling into the house of congress. There's just one small detail he didn't get right: when you heckle the prime minister in the UK, it is because you have caught him out in a bit of flannel so obvious, so self-evident, that it is all you can do to register your beggared credulity.

Language and expressions used in the Chamber must conform to a number of rules. Erskine May states "good temper and moderation are the characteristics of parliamentary language". Objection has been taken both to individual words and to sentences and constructions in the case of the former, to insulting, coarse, or abusive language (particularly as applied to other Members); and of the latter, to charges of lying or being drunk and misrepresentation of the words of another. Among the words to which Speakers have objected over the years have been blackguard, coward, git, guttersnipe, hooligan, rat, swine, stoolpigeon and traitor. Members sometimes use considerable ingenuity to circumvent these rules (as when, for instance, Winston Churchill substituted the phrase "terminological inexactitude" for "lie") but they must be careful to obey the Speaker's directions, as a Member who refuses to retract an offending expression may be named or required to withdraw from the Chamber.

You do not, as Wilson did, heckle the speaker because he has blown your cover with your constituents. This morning, predictably enough, the media looked into who was right and found — doh! — that it was Obama. Factcheck.org:

H.R. 3200: Sec 246 — NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS

Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.

What a tool.