iPhone Pre-Order Hell

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I have never felt like such a mindless, drooling zombie tool of corporate America as I’ve felt today. Endlessly trying to order an iPhone 4, dozens and dozens and dozens of attempts of going through the AT&T and Apple websites (before realizing that I can’t go through Apple.com because I won’t get my corporate discount that way), dozens of attempts to call the AT&T Premier phone line, getting disconnected again and again due to “unusually high call volume,” finally being connected with a person who wasn’t able to help me this morning, and then getting connected to someone a few minutes ago who was apparently the wrong person and put me back in phone queue hell.

And why? Do I really need this new phone on June 24? Not that I can get it on June 24 anymore, because they’ve sold out. Isn’t my current iPhone perfectly fine for a while?

I feel like I’m a rat pressing a metal bar over and over again and expecting a different result. I’m so fucking angry that I’ve spent hours trying to order this silly piece of electronics that I don’t even need and I’m annoyed at myself for being angry about it and I’m annoyed that I’m still persisting in trying to order it.

GRRRRRRRRRRRR.

The Impossible Presidency

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Last week, in light of the BP oil spill, Nick Kristof of the New York Times jokingly suggested that the United States needs a king and queen. We expect too much from our presidents, he says:

Our king and queen could spend days traipsing along tar-ball-infested beaches, while bathing oil-soaked pelicans and thrusting strong chins defiantly at BP rigs…

Our president is stuck with too many ceremonial duties as head of state, such as greeting ambassadors and holding tedious state dinners, that divert attention from solving problems. You can preside over America or you can address its problems, but it’s difficult to find time to do both.

Then there was this article in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, which I haven’t read yet but seems to be about how Obama doesn’t feel comfortable acting as head cheerleader of the Democratic Party.

This makes me think back to a book I read in college: The American Presidency, by Clinton Rossiter. Rossiter wrote his book in the 1950s, but his description of the bewildering number of presidential duties still holds up pretty well today. He identified 10 such roles. The emphasis in the following paragraphs is mine.

First, the President is Chief of State. He remains today, as he has always been, the ceremonial head of the government of the United States… [he is] expected to go through some rather undignified paces by a people who think of him as a combination of scoutmaster, Delphic oracle, hero of the silver screen, and father of the multitudes… The President, in short, is the one-man distillation of the American people just as surely as the Queen is of the British people…

The second of the president’s roles is that of Chief Executive. He reigns, but he also rules; he symbolizes the people, but he also runs their government… He alone may appoint, with the advice and consent of the Senate, the several thousand top officials who run the government; he alone may remove, with varying degrees of abruptness, those who are not executing the laws faithfully…

The President’s third major function is one he could not escape if he wished… the Constitution designates him specifically as “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States when called into the actual service of the United States.”… He is never for one day allowed to forget that he will be held accountable by people, Congress, and history for the nation’s readiness to meet an enemy assault…

Next, the President is Chief Diplomat. Although authority in the field of foreign relations is shared constitutionally among three organs — President, Congress, and, for two special purposes, the Senate — his position is paramount, if not indeed dominant… Leadership in foreign affairs flows today from the President — or it does not flow at all…

The President’s duties are not all purely executive in nature. He is also intimately associated, by Constitution and custom, with the legislative process, and we may therefore consider him to be the Chief Legislator… [he is] expected, within the limits of constitutional and political propriety, to guide Congress in much of its lawmaking activity… Upon many of our most celebrated laws the presidential imprint is clearly stamped… The President who will not give his best thoughts to guiding Congress, more so the President who is temperamentally or politically unfitted to “get along with Congress,” is now rightly considered a national liability…

Yet even these are not the whole weight of presidential responsibility. I count at least five additional functions that have been piled on top of the original load.

The first of these is the President’s role as Chief of Party… No matter how fondly or how often we may long for a President who is above the heat of political strife, we must acknowledge resolutely his right and duty to be the leader of his party. He is at once the least political and most political of all heads of government…

Yet he is, at the same time if not in the same breath, the Voice of the People, the leading formulator and expounder of public opinion in the United States. While he acts as political chieftain of some, he serves as moral spokesman for all… The President is the American people’s one authentic trumpet, and he has no higher duty than to give a clear and certain sound…

Perhaps the least known of his functions is the mandate he holds from the Constitution and the laws, but even more positively from the people of the United States, to act as Protector of the Peace. The emergencies that can disturb the peace of the United States seem to grow thicker and more vexing every year, and hardly a week now goes by that the President is not called upon to take forceful steps in behalf of a section or city or group or enterprise that has been hit hard and suddenly by disaster… in the face of a riot in Detroit or floods in New England or a tornado in Missouri or a railroad strike in Chicago or a panic on Wall Street, the people turn almost instinctively to the White House and its occupant for aid and comfort…

There is at least one area of American life, the economy, in which the people of this country are no longer content to let disaster fall upon them unopposed. They now expect their government, under the direct leadership of the President, to prevent a depression or panic and not simply to wait until one has developed before putting it to rout. Thus the President has a new function, which is still taking shape, that of Manager of Prosperity…

In order to grasp the full import of the last of the President’s roles, we must take him as Chief Diplomat, Commander in Chief, and Chief of State, then thrust him onto a far wider stage, there to perform before a much more numerous and more critical audience. For the modern President is, whether we or our friends abroad like it or not, marked out for duty as a World Leader. The President has a much larger constituency than the American electorate; his words and deeds in behalf of our own survival as a free nation have a direct bearing upon the freedom and stability of at least several score other countries…

The president is a ceremonial figurehead, leader of one of the three branches of government, commander of the U.S. military, our most visible face to the world, manager of a domestic legislative agenda, head of a political party, collective national conscience, keeper of domestic tranquility, manager of the economy, and international superhero.

So it’s basically an impossible job. And that’s when times are good. When times are bad, I don’t see how any human being can possibly succeed at it.

Painting Disaster

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I finally painted my home office this weekend, which I’d been planning to do for several weeks. I wiped myself out and then didn’t sleep well and today I’m tired and my legs are totally sore.

And after the painting and the sweating and the cleaning up… my office looks worse than it did before.

I don’t know what went wrong. I spent weeks looking at color chips, taping them to the walls of the room, buying some samples and painting them onto pieces of white posterboard. I finally bought paint yesterday morning in a blue hue that wasn’t exactly the same as any of the samples I’d tested, but it was similar, and it was one that had been taped to my wall for a couple of weeks.

Took it home, began painting, and when I finished the first coat, it looked terrible. The blue was way too bright.

I went back to the paint store, bought another gallon one shade darker, and used that for the second coat. It didn’t really help. It’s still too bright. It looks godawful. The original room color was blah, but now it’s garish. I preferred the blah. I expended all this effort and just wound up making the room worse.

Guess who’s going to be repainting his home office next weekend? I think I’m giving up on blue entirely and choosing a shade of soothing brown instead, like milky coffee colored or something.

I’m so annoyed.

Well-Roundedness

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I’ve been tending my inner geek lately. First, I’ve been teaching myself Python. Second, I’ve been reading Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter.

This is my third attempt at reading this book. The first time, in college, I got less than 100 pages into it before giving up. The second time, nine years ago, I got more than halfway through, but then I got bored with it, laying it aside one day and never picking it up again. This time, I’m determined to finish it, and I’ve gotten further than my last two tries, so things look promising. I don’t know how to describe this book: it’s about math, logic, computers, consciousness, intelligence, thinking, structure. It’s rough going at times, but tons of fun to read.

When I was a kid, I thought there was a clear line between math & science people, who were left-brained, and language arts & social studies people, who were right-brained. It was hard to fit myself into just one of these categories, because I loved math, but I also liked reading and history. (I wasn’t big on science.) And language arts was both left- and right-brained: alphabetizing and spelling and grammar were very rule-based and easy to get right, but reading comprehension and literature appreciation and creative writing were squishy and murky, and it was harder to come up with the right answer all the time.

I decided I was more of a math/computer guy. I loved math, and I took a computer class in elementary school and learned BASIC. For my ninth birthday in 1982, my parents got me my very first computer: a TI-99/4A, from Texas Instruments. (Pitched by Bill Cosby!) We hooked it up to a small TV in my bedroom (it didn’t come with a monitor), and I used to sit at the keyboard, typing in long programs in BASIC, line by line, from an open computer magazine in my lap. Or playing Munch-Man or Parsec or Adventure.

But in middle school or high school, something changed. I evolved from a math/computer-type person into something more romantic. I was still great at math, but I loved theater, I loved history, I loved to read, I enjoyed experiencing my emotions and thinking about the way I felt. People and words and ideas seemed more interesting than numbers. I didn’t start dressing in black or quoting Byron or anything like that. But I feel like I became irresponsible: I didn’t do as well on my college applications as I would have liked, and I became pre-med in college only to drop it for a history major after three semesters, trading a certain future for a murkier one. I didn’t really know what I wanted.

But now I’m delving back into computer programming and learning about number theory and logic, and I feel like a kid again. It’s sheer pleasure. I’m enjoying it for the same reason I love puzzles: it’s disconnected from anything morally weighty, unlike history. It’s timeless. It doesn’t go out of date. It’s just… fun.

I’ve always been intrigued by people who defy categorization, who transcend stereotypes: nerds who are secretly cool, cool people who are secretly nerds, romantic math geeks, high-achieving students who love watching TV. This is very much a Disney TV-movie way of looking at things, but I don’t care. I’m intrigued by people who are well-rounded.

Is it any wonder that my partner is a computer-programming musical-theater-loving TV afficionado with a master’s degree in library science?

That’s not the only reason why I love him, but I’m sure it’s part of it.

On with Python and Gödel and Escher and Bach.

Family Newspaper

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I love that a New York Times article that includes this:

There’s the first time he tried crack. (“The taste is like medicine, or cleaning fluid, but also a little sweet, like limes.”) The tryst with a taxi driver behind a 7-Eleven in Newark. (“What I want is the blurry oblivion of body-crashing sex.”) Or the time that his boyfriend, a downtown filmmaker who goes by the pseudonym Noah in the book, watches as Mr. Clegg smokes crack and has sex in a hotel room with a $400-an-hour Brazilian prostitute named Carlos. (“Shame, pleasure, care, and approval collide and the worst of the worst no longer seems so bad.”)

can also include this:

…Nick Flynn, author of a memoir whose graphic title cannot be published here.

Because, you know, it’s a family newspaper.

(The title? Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.)

Quotes About Lost

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Running list of great quotes about Lost as a whole (perhaps to be updated as I find more).

Drew McWeeny:

[N]o matter what I think of certain ideas or elements of not just this season but every season, I think “Lost” will stand as one of the biggest, boldest, strangest shows for a network to ever nurture and complete. The show existed on its own crazy terms for six years, and they’ve been six of the best years of TV I’ve ever enjoyed.

Alan Sepinwall:

Ultimately, “Lost” didn’t succeed because of the mythology. We’ve seen too many examples of mythology-heavy, character-light series fail over the last six years to think that. “Lost” succeeded on emotion…. When “Lost” was really and truly great, it locked you so deep into the emotions of the moment that the larger questions didn’t really matter.

Lost: The End

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Thoughts on the end of Lost:

— The episode title had a double meaning. Not just “The End” of the show, but… the real end. Death. The end of the show was about Buddhism. Letting go. Accepting death. All questions lead to more questions, as Allison Janney’s character said in “Across the Sea.” You get no answers in life. Life is about being lost. Death is the only place where you are not lost. It is the eternal answer.

It gives greater symbolism to all those times on the show when we focused in on someone’s eye opening. Waking up, pain, constant conflict and struggle, terror, alertness, awareness of suffering: life. With the end of the show comes the end of Jack: death. The end of pain and suffering and struggle.

Rose and Bernard had it right in last season’s finale, “The Incident.” When Sawyer, Kate and Juliet ran into them and explained how they had to stop Jack or they all would die, Bernard shrugged and said, “So we die.” Rose and Bernard had already learned to let go.

— Even though this wasn’t the answer for the flash-sideways universe I would have written, I accept it. It was poetic and poignant. It worked for me. I respect Cuse and Lindelof’s choices.

That said… a bit too much deception and manipulation on their part. This whole season, it seemed like the flash-sideways world was a result of the nuclear bomb. In “Happily Ever After” (that episode title makes more sense now), I thought Widmore put Desmond into the electromagnetic chamber in order to make him see the flash-sideways universe, because Widmore somehow knew about it, and Desmond’s knowledge of it would somehow help save the island. I thought the flash-sideways characters and the real characters would somehow penetrate the barrier between their two worlds and help make things right. But it turns out there was no connection after all. Widmore put Desmond into the chamber merely to test his electromagnetic resistance and see if he could survive in the Heart of the Island in order to help save it, yes. But what happened to Desmond in the flash-sideways world in that episode wasn’t connected plotwise to what happened to him in the real world in that episode. I think.

But… Eloise wasn’t part of the group who created the flash-sideways purgatory. The group would have had to create her. But none of them knew that she had killed Faraday and that she would therefore not want to let go of that world. So… that didn’t really make sense. Actually, I guess Jack and Kate read Faraday’s journal in the Others’ tent in 1977, and could have pieced it together, right? So they could have known.

Still, I don’t know. Cuse and Lindelof were a bit too clever by half in their deception (or not clever enough?), and the execution was kind of sloppy. Doesn’t totally make sense as a story. But even if it didn’t totally work for me logically and intellectually, it worked for me poetically and emotionally. I don’t totally buy it, but I do accept it and love it for what it is, if that makes sense.

— I guess Ben wasn’t ready to let go. Still atoning? Wanting to spend more time with imaginary Danielle and Alex, even if he knew it was imaginary?

— I really lost it when Claire gave birth to Aaron and Charlie came back in and all of Claire’s memories of the two of them came flashing back. Full-on waterworks. Tears, sniffling, shortness of breath. It happened again to a lesser extent when Sawyer and Juliet reunited. Those moments were just incredibly sweet and touching and emotionally fulfilling.

— As I said on Twitter: Jack Shephard was the William Henry Harrison of Island protectors.

— I wonder what year Hurley and Ben finally died. How long did they protect the island? I want to see a show where they have eternal life and they eventually bring another group of candidates to the island who arrive in a futuristic robot plane or boat and they are cyborgs.

— So Shannon, not Nadia, is Sayid’s true love?

— I really want to know what happened to Sawyer, Kate and Claire when they left the island and got back to the real world. What did they do for the rest of their lives? Especially Sawyer. Did he spend the rest of his life alone, pining for Juliet, until he died?

— Took me a while to figure out what the ending meant, especially when I saw the shoe still stuck in the bamboo tree after all this time. First I thought the whole island experience had turned out to have been a figment of Jack’s imagination, and that he had actually died in the first few seconds of the pilot episode. But no, he wasn’t wearing the same clothes as in the pilot, and he saw the Ajira plane overhead, and of course if he died in the pilot, he would never have had the profound experiences with everyone on the island, and what his father said to him in the church (that they all created this purgatory/holding area together because they had their most significant experiences of their lives together) wouldn’t have made sense. (Nor would Ben’s conversations outside the church with Locke and with Hurley.)

— So… I liked the ending. Everyone together and happy. It gave me this nice and warm feeling: this tight group of people who had these transformative experiences together.

Lost is over. But I won’t be letting go of it for a long time.

R.I.P, Losties.

Lost

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Lost ends on Sunday night, and I simultaneously can’t wait for the finale and don’t want the show to end. I’ve remained adamantly spoiler-free as to plot and guest stars, and I plan to keep it that way, but I’m really, really excited to see what happens.

I’ve loved the show for six years, but I’ve really immersed myself in it this season. While watching season six, I’ve also rewatched the first five seasons in order — all 103 episodes. I finished my rewatch a couple of weeks ago. (It helps that I work from home a few days a week; I’ve been able to knock one episode off during lunch and another one right after work, plus a few more at other times.)

It was a terrific experience. I hadn’t seen most of the episodes since they first aired; it was especially fun to rewatch season two, with the hatch and the button. And it was neat to watch earlier episodes knowing how things would later turn out. There were some interesting insights: for example, Jacob was first mentioned a lot earlier in the series than I’d remembered. And the convoluted timeline of the last few seasons was easier to follow the second time around: because I rewatched the episodes during such a compressed time period, it was easier to remember what was happening and keep the bigger picture in my head.

I was also shocked to realize how much of Lost I’d forgotten. There were a few scenes I literally couldn’t remember at all. Um, Juliet got branded on her lower back? (Part of the meandering season three.)

One thing I’ve paid more attention to the second time around has been the music. I’ve always loved Michael Giacchino’s beautiful score; Lost is rare in that it uses a full orchestra to record its score, rather than a synthesizer. But I never realized how complex that score is: there are so many different recurring themes for characters and plot situations. (One of my favorites is the mournful version of Ben’s theme, which is first heard during the Purge and recurs at various Ben-moments during the series.) I was thrilled to see that Alex Ross had a profile of Giacchino and his Lost scoring techniques in a recent New Yorker. Unfortunately, the full article isn’t online, but if you’re a fan of the music, you should find it and read it.

People like Lost for different reasons. They might like it because they want answers to the mysteries, or because they love the metaphysical issues it brings up, or because they love the characters, or because they like the cool way the narrative plays around with time, or because they like sci-fi or fantasy or adventure shows. This is a show with millions of fans, and clearly not everyone is going to like it for the same reasons.

For me, it has never been just about the mysteries. Although that has been a huge part of the fun, a show has to have more going for it than just a mystery. There’s a reason Lost succeeded while similar shows haven’t. For me, that reason is the characters. I’ve never been a big fan of Star Trek or Stargate-type shows because they’re usually less about character and more about techy sci-fi stuff. But I really enjoyed Battlestar Galactica, because it was about great characters and a greater mythology as much as it was a space opera. Lots of people were dissatisfied with how that show ended, because they didn’t like how the mythology came together, but I enjoyed it, because the character arcs mostly ended in satisfying ways.

What I learned from shows like The X-Files and Alias is that mystery serials will almost never be resolved satisfactorily. As Lost meandered through its third season and the mysteries only expanded, it seemed like the writers didn’t know where they were going. It was only after season three, when they gave themselves an end date, that things began to tighten up and the show got better again. (Shorter seasons also helped.)

But based on my previous experience with these types of shows, I’ve tried not to get my hopes too high for satisfying answers to all of Lost‘s mysteries. What I really care about are the characters. Jack has evolved from an arrogant skeptic into an almost mystical believer. Sawyer has changed from a reprobate into a more caring, loving person. Ben has been transformed from a scary, powerful man into a sad, sympathetic guy who has lost everything he had.

I’d really like to see a satisfying ending to everything on Sunday night. But if the mysteries don’t get fully resolved, I’ll be okay. As long as the characters all get satisfying endings, I’ll be happy.

God, I can’t wait.

Code

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Well, I’ve been doing a poor job of updating in the last couple of weeks. I guess we all get into slow periods.

Lately I’ve been geeking out with computers and math-type stuff. I recently finished re-reading Code, by Charles Petzold. If you want to understand how a computer works, from the ground up, this is the book for you. It starts out talking about codes: Morse code, Braille, binary code. Then it discusses how electricity works, and how telegraphs work, and how flashlights work. (The flashlight is actually a distant ancestor of the computer, as the book explains.) Then it goes into logic, and logic gates, and up and up, through simple calculations, and how computers “remember” things, and machine language, and assembly language, and high-level language, and monitors and keyboards and mice and the internet.

It starts with very simple concepts and gradually works its way up in complexity. Some parts of the book are rather hairy, but once it’s done, you really understand what a computer is doing when it’s on. (And when it’s off, for that matter.)

It’s a terrific book and I highly recommend it if you’re at all interested in this stuff.

Law & Order Canceled

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I came incredibly late to Law & Order. I’d seen a few random episodes over the last 20 years, but I was never a regular viewer. Not until two years ago did Matt and I start TiVo’ing it and watching it… during the show’s 18th season.

One night we saw a Broadway revival of Come Back, Little Sheba starring S. Epatha Merkerson, and I thought, “You know, I’ve always liked her.” So when we got home, I recorded the next upcoming episode of Law & Order, and we totally got sucked in. It’s so much fun to see familiar locations (twice in the last two years they taped scenes near our old apartment), and the ripped-from-the-headlines stories, and the guest stars from the theater community. The bio section of every Playbill is filled with L&O shout-outs.

And now it’s been officially canceled, and an L.A. version will take its place. (Just like what happened to the Brooklyn Dodgers.) I’ve never watched the spinoffs, and I don’t know if I will. But I might take a glance. Not that there’s not enough shows on TV, of course.

So a final BUM-BUM for Law & Order.

Childhood Idol

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What would you do if you encountered one of your childhood idols?

Last night, Matt and I went to the Public Theater to see Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a terrific, rocking, sexy show. Before we went to our seats, I went to use the restroom… and as I was leaving the restroom, Michael J. Fox walked in.

Now, to understand how I feel about Michael J. Fox, you will have to remember that Back to the Future is my favorite movie ever. I’ve been in love with that movie ever since I saw it in the theater as a kid, 25 years ago. I know Michael J. Fox is not really Marty McFly, but to me he always will be. And before Back to the Future, there was Family Ties, a show I always enjoyed. And after Back to the Future, there were several other movies and another TV show, and then he went public with having Parkinson’s disease, which only made me admire him more. He’s also written a few books (which I’ll admit I haven’t read), including a new one that just came out last month.

Last week he did a hilarious cameo on The Colbert Report. So I guess he must be in New York for a little while.

So anyway, after I left the restroom, I said to Matt, “Did you know who was in there? Michael J. Fox!” I wasn’t sure if he was seeing the same show as us, because the Public has a few different theaters in the building. But after we went into our theater and took our seats, I kept turning around to see if he walked in.

Sure enough, he soon did… and he sat down at the end of our row.

The Newman Theater at the Public isn’t very big — 300 seats. The last time we were there, Stephen Sondheim sat behind us.

I think Fox was with someone (his wife?), but I’m not sure, because I didn’t want to be too glaringly obvious and lean forward and stare at him.

My dilemma then began. I hate being the type of person who goes up to celebrities and says hello. But he’s not just a celebrity to me. He’s one of my heroes. This was an opportunity to go up to one of my heroes and say hello and tell him how much I’ve admired him since I was a kid. It was just a few minutes before 8:00, when the lights go down and the show starts, and there was no intermission. So I had to decide quickly.

And… I wound up staying in my seat. I was too nervous. I wouldn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to sound stupid, and I didn’t want to disturb him and his privacy.

So I missed my chance to say hi to Michael J. Fox.

When the show ended and the lights came up, I looked at the end of the row… and there were two empty seats. He and his theater companion were already gone, probably having slipped out unobtrusively during the curtain calls.

Sigh.

United Continental Logo

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United Airlines and Continental Airlines have announced a merger. United is buying Continental, and apparently the new company will still be called United Airlines but will use the Continental logo and font. I don’t think I’ve heard of anything like this before — a merger where one company adopts the old company’s font and logo but keeps its old name. Something seemed a little off about the logo until I realized that everything was the same except the text.

While looking for information about this, I found this little game, where you have to names as many brands as possible based on the font.

Prothalamia

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I sing with a gay men’s chorus called the Empire City Men’s Chorus, and I really should plug our upcoming spring concerts, where we’ll be premiering a newly-commissioned work about marriage equality.

The name of the piece, Prothalamia, translates as “songs in celebration of marriage.” In concept it’s a bit subversive: its structure mirrors the Latin mass (its five movements are called Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei), but the texts are secular, by Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, the ancient Roman writer Martial, and others. The music, by Charles Norman Mason and Dorothy Hindman (who are themselves married), is very modern and complex and quite beautiful.

We’re doing two concerts:

Sunday, May 23, 2010, 3:00 pm
Riverside Church
490 Riverside Drive, New York, NY

Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 8:00 pm
Church of St. Ann & The Holy Trinity
157 Montague St., Brooklyn, NY 11201

You can buy tickets online or at the door.