Painting

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I’ve recently entered the fun world of picking out paint colors. And it is fun… but also overwhelming.

Now that we live a two-bedroom apartment, I have a home office. (I work from home a few days a week, so we decided that the second, smaller bedroom could be my office.) And since I spend so much time there, I’ve decided I want to decorate it. Contrary to the gay stereotype, I’ve never been a very attentive decorator. I’ve never painted the walls of any apartment I’ve lived in, and I’ve never been very good about putting stuff on the walls or finding places for tchotchkes. I always intend to make an apartment feel lived-in and homey, but I never get around to doing it.

Why? Partly it’s because I’m uncomfortable spending money. And partly it’s because I have trouble psychologically “settling in” somewhere. Who knows how long I’ll be living in any particular place? I wind up moving into an apartment, and then several months go by and I haven’t decorated, and by that point we’re halfway through a lease and not sure if we’ll be staying. And whether we stay or not, the whole process happens again. Why spend the money to decorate a place if we’ll just be moving somewhere else at some point?

But I’ve decided that I need to live more in the present. And now that I’ve got this home office, I’d really like to turn it into a little sanctuary, a place where I can do work but also chill out sometimes (if I can find a comfy chair to put there). It’s not a huge space, but I could do something with it. I don’t like the current wall color (a pale peach) and the windows have dark-green metal blinds that are too wide for the windows (and don’t go with the peach).

Limitation: the lighting in the room is not great. There’s not much direct sunlight: the apartment is on the bottom floor of a ten-story building, and the room is on the inward-facing leg of an H, so the opposite side of the H blocks most direct sunlight from coming in, and the windows face north. And the overhead light is one of those long white fluorescent lamps, and I have no idea how a whole wall of color will look in that light.

I feel like I want some shade of blue. But oh my god there are so many paint shades. Benjamin Moore has several dozen shades of blue alone. And I can’t decide if I want a lighter blue or a darker blue. Maybe I don’t even want blue? Maybe I should paint the walls different colors for an invigorating effect? Maybe I should get rid of the rug I have in there right now, because it doesn’t necessarily go with the type of blue I want? I’ve gone to the paint store and brought home a bunch of paint chips and taped them to the walls and I’ve gone back and picked up more paint chips and bought paint samples and gone home and painted the paint samples onto pieces of posterboard and held them up to the walls. And nothing looks right. Not only does nothing look right, but I have no idea how an entire wall filled with a particular color is going to look.

It’s making me a little bit batty.

But it’s also kind of fun.

Obama and Blackness

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Homer said in a comment on my last post, about why the tea-partiers don’t like Barack Obama:

You forgot to mention Obama is black. That is really the problem. All the rest of the crap is just sorta random whining and sound bites. The tea partiers “Want our Country Back” because they never, ever imagined one of the black guys would be running it.

Actually, I think it’s more complicated. They don’t dislike him because he’s black, or at least not just because he’s black. They dislike him because he defies categorization. He has a white mother but a black father. And his father wasn’t an American but a Kenyan. And he lived in Indonesia for much of his childhood. And his first name has origins in Swahili and (OMG) Arabic. And his middle name is Arabic and is the same as the last name of that guy who Bush said had WMDs. And his last name doesn’t sound ‘merican.

Kenyan father, Indonesian childhood, a name with multiple foreign origins. What do they do with all of that? At least “Jesse Jackson” is pronounceable, and his ancestors were American slaves. They know what box to put him in. They know all about black people — they have generations of stereotypes about black people to fall back on. But what about that Obama guy? What box do we put him in? How are we gonna stereotype him if we don’t know what box to put him in? Obviously he must be hiding something. Kinda shifty and suspicious! At least black people are American. This guy doesn’t even seem American!

That’s the mentality, as far as I see it.

Tea Party Contradictions

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I have to admit, I’m a little confused as to what the tea partiers want. They blame Obama for bailing out the banks even though Obama wasn’t the president who bailed out the banks. And they blame Obama for doing this while at the same time they call him a socialist. So I guess he’s not a socialist, exactly; he’s… a corporatist-socialist? He’s in cohorts with American big business, while at the same time he wants to destroy it?

There’s an unresolved love-hate relationship with capitalism going on here. It’s been like this ever since the American Puritans decided that working hard and becoming financially secure was the only way to show that they had been saved by God, while at the same time issuing jeremiads against the prosperity they themselves had created.

Capitalism’s great, but along with the good stuff, there’s some not-so-good stuff, too. Ultimately, capitalism is about money, not morality, as the Puritans might have hoped. If you have capitalism, you will have Family Guy and wardrobe malfunctions, because people like to laugh at dirty jokes and look at boobs and that’s what sells. In fact, the people who like to laugh at dirty jokes and look at boobs are — gasp — the very same people who say it’s bad to laugh at dirty jokes and look at boobs. No wonder we’ve got a problem. People don’t know what they think about something as personal as sexuality; how can they know what they think about capitalism?

People want to live in a world where they have the freedom to get rich, and then they get mad when other people get rich instead. That’s why they can simultaneously believe that Obama both loves and hates big business; it’s because they do, too.

In the war of Big Evil Government versus Big Evil Corporate Banks, whose side do they take? Thinking about this would make their heads explode. But it’s not even that simple. Sometimes Big Evil Government is on the same side as Big Evil Corporate Banks, and sometimes not. Because sometimes what’s good for the big corporations is good for the little guy, and sometimes it’s not.

There are no clear “sides” here. There’s a spectrum. And Obama is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. He doesn’t want to destroy the capitalist system; he just wants to soften its rough edges. There are so many people who don’t seem to understand this. They prefer a simpler world where they can have enemies.

It’s frustrating to listen to all the ranting.

Angie

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Today I stumbled upon the opening credits of a sitcom I’d never seen before: the short-lived Angie, from 1979-1980, on ABC. It was a romantic sitcom starring Donna Pescow, an actress I’d previously associated with 1970s reruns of The Match Game (but who’s apparently better known for Saturday Night Fever), and Robert Hays, later of Airplane and the Starman TV series. It started out as a ratings hit, but it apparently crashed and burned after the lead characters got married in the second-season premiere.

Still, I love this theme song — it’s so 1970s and cheesy and tuneful! It’s by Maureen McGovern and apparently became a brief pop hit and now I can’t get it out of my head. And how about that whole come-into-the-circle-and-pose-and-smile thing? That’s so Love Boat! Awesome. (I’ve always wondered how the actors know where to stand so that they’re inside the circle. How does that work?)

Even better, here’s the full song:

“The View” Taping

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Matt and I had a cool experience this morning — we were in the live audience for The View.

We used to watch the show back when Rosie O’Donnell was on, and then we watched it occasionally when Whoopi Goldberg and Sherri Shepherd joined, so it seemed like a cool thing to try to get tickets for. We’d signed up online for tickets a long time ago — maybe a year ago or more? And then a couple of weeks ago, we suddenly got two tickets in the mail for this morning’s live show.

We got to the studio around 8:45 in the morning, and they started letting us into the building about 20 minutes later. After showing our tickets and going through security, we had to wait in a holding area for an hour, until about 10:30 (that was the slowest, most boring part of the morning). Then they took us up to the studio in a small elevator.

I’ve been to a couple of TV show tapings before (The Daily Show and The Colbert Report), and I’ve seen TV studios a couple of other times in the past, and it’s always such a weird experience when you first walk into one, especially one you’ve seen before on TV. It’s so bright and shiny and chilly and simultaneously real and artificial.

The audience seemed to be about 95 percent female. We counted only a handful of men, and the few we counted seemed to be there with their wives. We seemed to be the only male couple, although there were one or two guys in the audience who might have been on our team.

We got to sit in the middle of the center section, third row, although there was a smaller section in the very front of the audience, so we were some distance from the stage area. A warmup comedian came out and trained us in applauding loudly and enthusiastically. And then at 11 a.m., the show began, and out came Barbara Walters, Joy Behar, Whoopi, and Sherri. Elisabeth Hasselbeck is out this week, which didn’t bother me; I was just psyched that Barbara Walters was there, since she only does two or three shows a week. She’s a television legend and it was cool to see her in person.

The sound in a TV studio is different than in a theater — it’s so crisp and clear, but sterile, with no reverberation. When the hosts were talking, we could hear them perfectly through their mikes. It was almost like watching them on TV. And since a camera was blocking my view of Sherri Shepherd, there were a few times when I did actually glance at the TV monitors above our heads.

Unfortunately, there were no celebrity guests. It was mainly a Day of Hot Topics, although the final segment did have non-celebrity guests: a family who had a daughter with a red blood cell deficiency and who then had another kid who was then able to donate some of his blood and cure her. Everyone in the audience got a copy of a new book about the family, The Match, on the way out. This is not a topic that really interests me, but, hey, free book, I guess.

At the end, we got our free book as well as a free tote bag filled with several bags of pita chips from a food company.

TV tapings are always fun. It was neat to think that what we were seeing live in person was simultaneously being seen on TV all over the Eastern and Central time zones. Women watching at home all over America, in Kansas, in Florida, in North Carolina, in Ohio… and later in New Mexico, and Idaho, and California, and Hawaii… in small towns and suburbs and cities far, far away from us.

TV is so cool!

Tags

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After more than nine years of blogging, I have finally begun using tags on my blog posts. I added them over the weekend. You’ll see them at the bottom of each post.

And with the help of the Simple Tags plugin for WordPress, I can search old posts for certain keywords and automatically tag those that are relevant. I have nearly 5,000 posts on this blog, so I don’t think I’ll be able to tag all of them, but for all future posts I’ll be using tags, so if you’re reading a post, you’ll be able to find my other posts that discuss similar content. For example, here are all my posts about my favorite movie, Back to the Future.

Now I just need to remember to use tags whenever I write a new post.

Stevens to Retire; Appoint a Woman!

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So, there it is… Justice Stevens is retiring at the end of this term, the day after the Supreme Court begins its summer recess.

First, some geekery. His retirement date means that he’ll just miss becoming the second-longest serving justice in Supreme Court history, as I speculated last fall, since the Court will most likely recess on June 28. Even if the Court recesses on July 1 — which is not likely and might happen only if there are too many decisions to announce at the end of the term — Stevens would retire on July 2, and thus tie Stephen Field as the second-longest serving justice. Right now Stevens ranks fourth; 41 days from now he’ll surpass the legendary John Marshall to become third.

I’m sure he doesn’t care about any of that stuff, though. Only geeks like me do.

Now the speculation begins on a successor. And I really, really want Obama to nominate another woman.

It’s ridiculous that in the year 2010, only two of the nine justices are women. Bush tried to nominate a woman to replace O’Connor — Harriet Miers — but when her nomination failed, he nominated Sam Alito, leaving Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the only woman on the Court. Obama did the right thing in choosing a woman to replace Souter, and Stevens’s replacement should be a woman as well.

Demographics should be secondary to a Supreme Court nomination, but when a president is looking for someone of a particular ideology or judicial temperament, there are usually several people to choose from, so he has the leeway to choose another woman. Fortunately, it looks like the name with the most buzz for the last couple of months has been Solicitor General Elena Kagan. Several weeks ago, SCOTUSblog profiled her, as well as a few other contenders, and considered her the front runner.

But this is interesting — if she were nominated and confirmed, the Supreme Court would have six Catholics and three Jews. Would fundamentalist Protestants be annoyed at having no representation? After all, to quote that link, “it’s not like having devout Catholics on the bench is a substitute for having a couple of Protestants, any more than having a Clarence Thomas on the bench is the same as having an African-American.”

The Supreme Court is problematic today — a small group of nine people can enact major change in this country, for better or for worse. Perhaps a larger court would be better, and not just because it would dilute the identity politics somewhat. (The Constitution doesn’t say there have to be nine justices — all it takes is an act of Congress, although the last time a president tried to make that happen, it didn’t work out.)

Of course, even in a larger body — the current United States Senate — only 17 out of 100 members are women. But given the infrequency with which the Supreme Court membership turns over, change comes even more slowly to that body.

Even three out of nine justices would be too few women on the Court. But it would help redress a great annoyance.

Bloomberg at Hair

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After every performance of Hair on Broadway, the audience is invited to come up on stage and dance, and the video of each night’s dance party is posted on the show’s website. NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg was there on Wednesday night and took the stage, and he was captured dancing on camera. You can see him at about 1:02 and 2:14 and then again near the end. [via]

I love that mayors can do this kind of thing. Not to mention ride the subway.

Equal Height Shoes

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Shoes that make everyone the same height.

I’m really curious about what it would be like to be at such a party. I’d love to see how much our different heights unconsciously play into our interactions with other people. I’m shorter than average (5 foot 6), so I unconsciously raise my gaze when I’m speaking with someone who’s taller than me.

But that’s only when we’re both standing, and there are many situations where you and your speaking companion aren’t both standing. You might be sitting down together at lunch or over drinks, or sitting on the couch, or someone might visit your cubicle and stand while you’re sitting in your chair at work. Still… interesting.

Living in the Future

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Sometimes I feel like we’ve been living in the future for the last 100 to 130 years. What I mean is, sometimes it seems like the real world ended sometime in the late nineteenth century, and everything since then has been an epilogue, or not quite real. At various times I feel like the real world ended with the invention of the light bulb, or with the beginning of World War I, or with expressionism or atonal music — that the world stopped making sense somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century, and that nothing since then has been real: automobiles, movies, TV, radio, rock music, space travel, iPads.

Of course, every new technology has made the world seem different. One could just as easily say that the real world ended with the invention of the railroad, or with the Industrial Revolution, or the creation of cities, or the development of agriculture or the invention of writing. The last 5,000 to 10,000 years themselves could just be an epilogue to the vast human history that came before it. Perhaps ancient nomadic tribal society was the last “real” type of human existence.

That may be true, but there’s something about the light bulb to me that just seems different. It changed human existence not gradually but immediately and drastically. It robbed us of our regular circadian rhythms, and there must have been something magical about it. Or maybe I’m really thinking of electricity, not just the lightbulb? Maybe it was the telegraph that began to make the world seem unreal?

By “unreal,” I mean that electricity is something we can’t see. It’s something we can’t intuitively understand. Human beings can understand steam power, or mechanical power, or farming. But electricity? It seems like magic. I can’t even imagine how you’d explain the internet to Thomas Jefferson. And remember the first time you saw an iPhone? Remember how fucking awesome it was that you could zoom in on a website just by pinching it with your fingers? I’ve got an iPhone in my pocket and it still feels like magic.

Maybe that’s what I mean. We live in a world we don’t understand.

And yet… even the iPad is created out of materials that have existed for a few billion years. Yes, the materials have been mined and refined and chemically treated, and the architecture might be based on principles nobody understood until a few decades ago, but the raw materials themselves — the elements — have existed since the Earth finished forming. If we could somehow teleport an enormous group of human beings back in time a few thousand years — a group containing the right mix of people, including experts in every subject imaginable — they could probably recreate our modern conveniences, eventually. Some of them would know how to mine metal, some would know how to create electricity, and then electrical generators, and some would know how to create lathes, and so on. They could create the meta-tools needed to create the tools needed to create anything we have today. It couldn’t be done instantly, but it could be done.

Ultimately there is no “real” versus “un-real.” There was no golden age of the world. Ever since the Big Bang, the universe has been changing, and it always will change.

Sometimes the world I’m living in doesn’t feel real, but it is as real as I am. This world is weird, but I can laugh, and cry, and feel fear and happiness, and the littlest things can seem like the realest, most important things in the world to me.

As long as I am real, my world is real.

Screen Clutter

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Lost is my favorite show on TV, even though the final season so far has been a little slow and disappointing. But the other night it was practically unwatchable, because for nearly the entire hour there was this bright red “V” at the bottom of the screen along with a countdown clock, promoting an upcoming episode of, well, V. The first scene of the episode was tinted green, because the characters were being seen through night-vision lenses, which made the ugly red V stand out even more. This episode also had lots of subtitles and a couple of scenes where a character was writing on a pad, and some of the words were obscured:

[image via Alan Sepinwall]

The TV executive who came up with this idea should be fired, though it’ll never happen. I’m used to bugs by now, but, really? Bright red? It couldn’t at least have been translucent? And you needed to include a countdown? We don’t have clocks?

And apparently it worked, because now for an aside about V.

I watched the first episode of the V remake last fall and was underwhelmed. Perhaps I’d have liked it better if I hadn’t seen the original as a kid. First of all, on the new series, the characters refer to the aliens as “the V’s,” which is totally ridiculous because in the original story, “V” stood both for “Visitors” (the aliens) and for the hoped-for “victory” against them; it wasn’t their frickin’ nickname. But I guess in the 21st century we have to dumb everything down.

I also actively hated a couple of the characters. I haven’t watched the show since.

So some big stupid red V is not going to make me tune in to your stupid remake. Lost is practically a religious experience for some people — me included — and we don’t want any distractions. You want to put garbage on the screen during something like Dancing With the Stars that doesn’t require any brain cells, fine, but don’t interrupt me when I’m trying to watch Lost.

The Hulu.com version didn’t have the V at the bottom, but that would have required waiting a day and trying to avoid spoilers.

Here’s more on the stupid red thing. And Alan Sepinwall went on a long rant about it, which made me feel better because it meant I wasn’t alone in hating it.

I’m just waiting until the night my dreams start to have TV logos in the bottom corner. Dude, what if someday they invent a sleeping pill that has in-dream ads for cola and TV shows?

Celebrity Sightings

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Has it really been a whole week since I last blogged? I have a couple of half-written entries in the hopper, but by now they’re stale.

I’ve had a couple of performer sightings lately. Last night we saw a preview of American Idiot, which (and here I will give my opinion even though it was a preview) is a loud, enjoyable spectacle that takes us back to the dark days of George W. Bush’s America circa 2004. The plot is a bit underdeveloped — it kind of reminded me of one of Twyla Tharp’s jukebox musicals in that the characters are archetypes, although it also had elements of Hair and Spring Awakening (with which it shares a director and a star). Great choreography — very frantic jerky moves which reminded me of Spring Awakening as well. The New York Times has a long article about the show today. I wound up recognizing some of the songs — the score is Green Day’s American Idiot album, and I guess I must have heard the songs on the radio or on TV in the last few years. That made me feel cool.

I continue to fail to understand why louder is always better, though. I guess I just have sensitive ears. Rock of Ages was one big headache for me — that show was so fricking loud that it actively pissed me off and I couldn’t enjoy it.

But anyway, on the way into the theater last night I saw Lin Manuel Miranda. He was with a woman and he was speaking Spanish to her and they just seemed like regular folks. I wonder what he thought of the show.

My other sighting happened on Wednesday afternoon. I was standing on the platform at the Summit, NJ, train station, waiting for my train home from work. I was playing a game on my iPhone, and when I looked up, I realized that Daniel Eric Gold, of Ugly Betty and Off-Broadway, was standing right next to me. I’m 99.5 percent sure it was him, at least. He was wearing this big puffy knit Rasta hat. I don’t know what he was doing at the Summit train station, but we both got onto the New York train and I wound sitting in the same car as him. I thought about saying hi, because I remember seeing him several years ago in Craig Lucas’s play Small Tragedy at Playwrights Horizons and thinking, who is this unknown actor? he’s really good! (Lee Pace was also in that play, and I thought the same thing about him). I thought he’d be much more impressed by someone complimenting him on a six-year-old award-winning Off-Broadway performance than by someone complimenting him on Ugly Betty. But I decided I would come off sounding stupid and I didn’t want to disturb him.

I kind of wish I had done it anyway.

Hypocrite

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I’m just going to quote this Talking Points Memo post in its entirety.

The Washington Post today has a profile of Mike Vanderboegh, the 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama who last week posted a call for people to throw bricks through the windows at Democratic offices around the country to protest their votes for Health Care Reform. Whether the people who actually did this over the last week did so in reaction to his call to arms is not clear. But he’s happy to take credit and others are crediting him too.

But Vanderboegh really is a classic exemplar of scream-at-your-TV tea-partyish extremism. A radical libertarian, champion of getting big government off the people’s backs, his day job? Vanderboegh lives on government disability checks down outside of Birmingham, Alabama.

I have nothing to add.