Author: Aaron Weber

The Long Beach Crips book club is about to annoint its latest pick, and I’m still catching up to the one from two years ago. It’s called Case Histories and it’s excellent: a literary novel that happens to involve a private detective whose clients are mostly sad sacks like himself, hoping against hope that they’ll find answers. Some of them do. It works out well.

Cingular Service Must Die

I’ve been patient about my cell phone for all too long. The battery life is under 24 hours standby. The text messages that arrive hours or days late. The voicemails that appear only when I call in. The inability to recover from going into the subway without an actual reboot.

But today tops it. I had a six PM (three pacific) job interview. At six fifteen, as I was sitting next to my cell phone, waiting for the call, it beeped. The interviewer had called twice and left voice messages. The phone had never rung.

Someone will feel my wrath. Heads will roll. I swear before heaven and earth, someone responsible will feel. my. wrath.

What bugs me is that I know that switching carriers is more or less futile, since they all have equally crap service.

Pretentious Guys Named David

I’ve started reading “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace’s latest book of essays, and I have, against all expectations, begun to like it. The first piece, “Big Red Son,” about the Adult Video News awards show, has all the humor and vitriol that makes DFW so good– and all the annoying digressions and notes and abbreviations that make his work read like notes for an article, rather than a finished product. Still, I liked it.

Even more, I liked the second piece, on Updike. I’m not a big Updike reader, but this piece is great: it manages to skewer both irrational Updike-haters and Updike’s place in the canon of postwar American fiction.

What got me started on this post, even before I’ve finished the book, is the way that DFW illustrates exactly what irritates him about Updike’s protagonist, and by extension, Updike and his entire generation of solipsistic narrators. It’s his “bizarre adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for human despair.”

Anyway, I expected David Foster Wallace to be well written and insightful and incisive. I did not expect it to be enjoyable. This book is. Highly recommended.

Rendezvous at Former Burger King

It’s been well reviewed in a number of places already, but Rendezvous, the new restaurant by a former Blue Room chef is really just beginning to take off.

Some people concentrate on the gentrification it brings: from Burger King to high-end restaurant, even here at the far end of the square. But honestly, I was entirely focused on a diverse wine list (we had an organic red from Puglia called Il Pioniere, like nothing I’d ever had, tangy and musky at the same time) and excellent food. We had celery-root salad with pomegranate seeds, huge roasted sardines, steak with truffled parsnips, lamb tagine, and finally an almond panna cotta. It was like some kind of dream, but I know it was real: unable to finish the steak, we brought it home, and I ate it for breakfast the next day.

Everybody makes fun of the Pupli kids! Even me!

We went to Ikea on Saturday.

Going on Saturdays is a mistake. So crowded.

By the second floor, and the third hour, there were many, many cranky children. Including me.

We came home with an Expedit bookshelf and also some other stuff we hadn’t thought we needed, but which seemed like a good idea at the time. Curtains! Pillows! Lamps! A flask!

To compensate, I didn’t leave the house today.

Steel Guitar

I’ve got two playlists on my iPod: gym music and spacey music for walking around and being on the T. “What Comes After the Blues” by Magnolia Electric Company figures prominently in the second list, as does the earlier Songs: Ohia album “Magnolia Electric Company.”

And Chris Clark, but more about that later.

Today I’ve been listening to Peoria Lunchbox Blues. The version with steel guitars and Scout Niblett on vocals (best name ever, by the way).

You see when you are just a kid
They think you won’t remember what they did
they think you won’t remember…But you did
Then you learned how to say “Everything you love
Tries to get away,”
Everything you love finally does.

Maybe I love the words, maybe I’m just a sucker for steel guitar. But it’s in heavy rotation now.

Dumb and Lazy

You’d think I’d update more, what with not having to get up and go to worky worky. But mostly I’ve been getting slower and dumber and lazier the longer I’ve been out of work. Accomplishments this week: did legally required minimum work search. Filed for unemployment benefits. On Tuesday I took a shower, and on Wednesday I made some dinner. Today my goals, in addition to posting this crap, are to shower and leave the house. We’ll see how far I get.

Here There be Tygers is a fun journal by a nice young woman named Anette who joined me and a few other folks for shabu-shabu on my birthday. We followed the meat-and-soup with $2 pints of Brubakers at the Tam. Quite the holiday celebration.

Disintermediation

The promise of internet-based commerce has long been that it allows buyers and sellers to come together in an efficient manner. Real estate is finally succumbing. I am so happy to see FSBO Madison come into existence and into play. It doesn’t just mean that when I am finally ready to buy a house, I will get a better deal. It also means that the internet really is helping people (well, not Realtors, but everybody else), and more importantly, it means that I was right. And I love being right.