Book Club Archives

In Defense Of Cold Pizza In The Candy House

I have an affection for cold pizza that must be attributable to favorable memories. Pizza is band food, college food, party food, food young people enjoy together with or without beers. After the gig or party or session or thing, if one had the sense to close the box, 12 or 18 hours later, at room temperature, with or without a hangover, the cold pizza can be a great blessing. You’re ready for a bite, you open the box, Eureka, two slices remain, it’s just you and the room and your itinerary and a quick lunch or 3AM snack and off you go. Peppers, garlic, cheese, tomato sauce, a crust which New Yorkers scoff at but will eat under the circumstances, maybe some pepperoni or sausage and you’re hungry – you’ve worked or gigged or partied or all of these, and this, this is the most welcome deliciousness in all of culinary anything in the right moment.

Ordering books, while savoring cold pizza from last night’s in-hotel dinner from Pizzeria San Marco in Lübeck. Ordered The Candy House by Jennifer Egan. Several of my friends have mentioned this novel to me since she apparently mentions The UpTones in the story, and said friends recommend the book highly, and only now am I getting around to it. Why? Reading glasses. I have reading glasses now and.. Well I can read, with them!

Pre-ordered also the new second edition of In Defense Of Ska by Aaron Carnes. I have his 1st edition, found it a wildly fun and informative read, and this obsessed defender of ska has gone and made an expanded edition. The UpTones are part of that story, and in the course of interviews with Mr. Carnes we became pals and I also reconnected with some other peeps from my distant cold-pizza-gigging past as a result of his efforts and research.

Now equipped with fresh reading glasses yes, I am reading books again, not exclusively reading on my computer as I have done for the last decade or so. Progress. I promise I’ll also read some books that don’t involve the UpTones! And maybe heat the pizza, but no promises there.

Finishing an amazing vaca with adventures with friends and family, and I’ll share more about this when I get home, including a bunch of photos.

Guten Abend, and bon appétit

Bah Bah Blog Sheep, Have You Any Green?

When teh Inertnets was a widdle baby, I visited a “colocation” site where companies and individuals could rent space to host their webservers. “Servers” made me think restaurant, but these were “boxes” – that is, computers, some of them not unlike the one eventually ravaged by Angry German Kid. Linux was newish, Windows NT was overlording and Apple squeaked from a distance “We’re not dead!” Startups and investors roamed the valley in search of meat as the words “dot com” caused money to rain from ice sculptures. In the colocation building there were cages, each cage padlocked from the outside, LEDs within blinking furiously, whirring of hard drives and thousands of cooling fans created a soothing yet deafening hum. Oh, this is it, I thought – the whole William Gibson, Philip K. Dick business – souls in these electron-streams, experiencing reality of a sort, invisible except in there, in those caged boxes among each other. What did it mean to me? What was my relationship to this lunacy? I didn’t know yet but I was attracted to it, attracted and repulsed, as to a great fun drug with unpleasant side-effects, and still today I am. The boxes are smaller now and “blade” shaped, racks upon racks filling untold acres of energy-devouring computing power, keeping the light flowing so I can “like” a pic of PKD and his adorable kitty.

The Long Vacation by Alex Panasenko

I read Alex Panasenko’s memoir, The Long Vacation, this weekend. A delightful romp through the moral simplicities of Europe in the mid 20th century. If you believe that, the Golden Gate Bridge is for sale. Really it’s an entertaining and horrifying and funny and shocking and profound and vulgar and appalling ride to hell and back repeatedly. Then comes the second chapter!

Spoiler-ish alert. The final paragraph is so devastatingly bleak and funny at once, that I couldn’t decide whether to laugh hysterically or give up on humanity altogether, so I did a bit of both. But overall, the book helped restore my own will that we treat each other well, and ourselves well, regardless of what negative bullshit anyone may ever tell us about ourselves or others.

The author was, years after the events portrayed in the book, my biology teacher at Berkeley High School. The jovial, engaging and brilliant teacher I knew as a teenager, came up from a childhood worlds different from mine. I’m glad he wrote this book, or I would never have known his story. A story which also happens to be relevant to current events in terrible and important ways.

War is crazy. Bigotry is crazy. These things are crazy and ridiculous, yet they persist in being such large pieces of the human experience. After I closed the book, I had an unexpected musing: “The worst things people ever did were done by people.” And quickly reminded myself that the opposite is also true.