Teach Me How To Birthday

It's my birthday today. I'm 56 years young, and I feel great. Gout's in remission, new LaserDisc of "Ordinary People" arrived in the mail today, and I've got Toto on pump here in the condo. Not too loud, though, since I can't really listen to loud music like I used to!

At any rate: this doesn't really mean as much anymore, all this stuff. I'm a little bit older and a little bit happier than usual, and I guess that's a good thing and augurs well enough. But I think it mostly owes to the video above. That is the attitude I am going to take in the year ahead. Also the life-jacket I am going to wear at all times, just in case.

Have You Had Your Bon Iver Annie Lennox Cover Today?

It's part of a new series here at the blog, in which I will post my favorite covers of Annie Lennox songs every single day until I run out of favorite Annie Lennox covers. So there will be no part two, probably. But I liked this, so there it is.

To All My Neighbors

Oh, you've got much flavor. Enjoy that.

Found Troosers

Always be closing the in-jokes. Everything is Terrible is always good, but this is speed-up-a-7-hour-car-ride good. I'll see you in Branson.

Blanket Coverage

No particular reason for this, other than that it's beautiful. My friend Josh Herr reminded me -- with a link to this very nice cover of The Cure's "In Between Days" by Superchunk -- of The Onion AV Club's Undercover thing, in which they invited 25 bands to cover 25 different songs. I think Wye Oak chose well, obviously (I also think Jenn Wasner should stop calling me, because I am married and I don't care how appealing your voice and face and manner is -- leave me be, lady!), and I actually linked to Ted Leo's excellent Tears For Fears cover months ago as a sort of apology for this ambivalent and heavily qualified anti-appreciation of his work. Do I even need to add "ambivalent and heavily qualified" to links to my own stuff? Infer that. It is inferrable, by this point.

(Also, I know that Budweiser's brand is bulletproof -- it certainly has survived being attached to a not-that-great beer -- but the commercials that follow these performance videos are the saddest, sorest thumbs I've seen in a while. After an earnest expression of artistic enjoyment and enthusiasm, the "Guys like to do really obvious things... and drink Bud!" falsity of those ads is jarring and kind of weirdly sad. Okay, Budweiser: what you say people are like, they're like. Good thing they sometimes also do really good covers of nice songs, or what a boring and scared and predictable world this would be).

David Rasche's Greatest (Unbilled) Performance, Klaus Kinski's Worst

Los Angeles, man. Everyone's a movie expert out there. They're like, "Yeah, of course, but have you really watched Crawlspace, or just kind of watched it?" And everyone's all giving you these great weird documentaries in which an ill-dressed filmmaker guy delivers a monologue on Klaus Kinski's on-set nightmarishness, with periodic interpolations of same. Literally everyone does this.

What an interesting city it would be, were that so. But while I did only a moderate amount of Kinski or movie-related talking -- with an expert, but still -- I still found Los Angeles very much to my liking. It's hard for me to put my finger on anything I actually accomplished out there that didn't involve driving around, nostalgia, or delicious fast-ish food, but there was so much of that, and so many good people helping me do it, that it's hard to term it anything but a win.

That includes, by the way, the fact that I am doing this particular bit of back-scratching and Kinski-trolling from an airplane, thanks to United's in-flight internet. I can barely believe it myself, but here I am, typing away like the little typer that I am. United is hilarious, too -- very on point and admirably on-time and all that thus far on both legs of the trip, but there are like four tiers of seating on this aircraft, all of them described as "exclusive" in one way or another. Like a big flying nightclub. I'm in "Economy Plus," which is the exclusive club nearest the bathroom. An announcement also told us that the entire staff and crew wished a very special welcome to each and every one of us, which was a nice thought but sounds exhausting. They should've just saved that sentiment for the Platinum Plus Elite Supreme Team Express-Gold flyers, I think. I would just settle for a little bag of Gardetto's mix, and I kind of doubt I"m even going to get that.

Dawg Blawging: Fetch Lives

More excellence from The Lady Miss Cleo, here, and her radically transgressive understanding of how "Fetch" is played.



Really, Kate is kind of the star of this one, just in terms of hustle and scrappiness and max-effort persistence. She's like David Eckstein, but all foxy:



Yes, I have noticed that my father is wearing an apron in basically every photograph I have of him. But thanks for pointing that out.

Great Moments In On-Camera Anxiety

Given the choice, I would rather keep my distinctive brand of nervous pallor on my side of the monitor, so as to be a less disquieting presence for my notional readers and etc. But I do have one on-camera credit to my name that -- while I've dumped it in the right hand column with my other clips -- I am excited to be able to plug into this post. I'm excited both because I love this particular clip and had forgotten all about it, but also because this is the first time -- and hold your applause, please -- that I've been able to figure out how to embed it in a blog post.

Most people are familiar with "embed codes" for videos, but since I'm apparently 57 years old this is the first time I've been able to find the magical code for this brief Slate Vvideo I made a couple years ago. The video is about a company, now revealed as something of a scam, named Spot Runner, which produced build-to-suit political ads for $499 a pop. I wrote this piece, and thanks to some photographs taken by my wife Kate and Spot Runner's largesse, got them to put together an ad for me. The whole video is here:

I know! Right here in the post! The 1990s are going to be mind-blowing. Johnny Mnemonic was more prescient than we knew.

UPDATE: More flubby heroism from me: the full-size version of the vid was too wide for this space (maybe this is why people have Tumblrs?), so I had to shrink it down in the embed code. Thus the fact that it's very small. If you want to experience the Spot Runner ads and my own clammy terror in glorious full(er) screen, click here. If you have any idea on how I could make it look a little better, please email me.