RIP JD Salinger

I was going to write something, but ten seconds after I started typing, Salinger rose up from the grave, hired a bunch of lawyers, and sued me.

Celebrity Death Pool: It sure beats Rikers!

I was heading to the Dedham Mall with Cheryl Peyton Rooke back when she was Cheryl Peyton one Saturday or Sunday in the late spring/early summer of 1980; we were going to lunch later but she had picked out a new couch for her apartment and she wanted me to take a look at it, partly because I'm the guy women take with them when they go shopping for stuff and partly because Cheryl knew that the more we did friend stuff together, the less I'd feel attracted to her. (God I was so in love with her.) She she's driving and we're talking and listening to WBCN and in the the middle of our conversation we hear the DJ announce a new song and then four L-O-U-D guitar chords reach out of the car radio and punch us both in the chest, after which this coked-out punk rocker chants a litany of all his friends who DIED! DIED! And the two of us look at each other and say, "What the hell?" because it's 30 years ago and nobody said "What the fuck?" like they do now, and as the song keeps playing (and playing) and never loses a beat (and never actually hits a note, it's an all-shouting song), the two of us start laughing like little kids, especially when we hear "These are friends who DI-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-IED!!!!"

"Oh my God," Cheryl said. "Who IS this?" "Whoever he is, he's on a lot of drugs," I said. And for the next month, all either one of us had to do was say "Died. Died." and both of us would start laughing like like crazy people.

Almost 30 years later and that song's been on every dance tape I ever mixed. Best memory: at Tommy's birthday bash, when that song came on and we started pogoing and shouting out the lyrics, and the friends who weren't part of the Norwood Ave crowd looked at us like they were Quakers and we had just become possessed by Satan. By the end of the song they were all driving back to relieve their babysitters, and maybe listen to some Nat King Cole to clear their musical palate. Which was too bad. They totally missed out on "I Wanna Be Sedated."

So thanks, Jim. And Cheryl? If you're out there? Died. Died.

Random thoughts

Celebrity Death Pool: Walter Cronkite Edition. It says a lot about America that we define "trust" as "believing in a guy who can read a script believably." There's actually a word for that in the dictionary, and it ain't "newscaster." It's "actor." As in pretending to be what you're not. I have no idea what Walter Cronkite was like when he wasn't reading a script from a teleprompter, but because he played the Reliable Narrator, I do know one thing about him that I didn't read once in any of his obituaries. He was to network news what Ronald Reagan was to politics: a performer elevated to a position of power and influence purely because of the way he could sell a story.

Reliving my childhood.



Hey kids -- comics! And wonder of wonders -- comics reviewed in the Books section of the daily New York Times!

My kind of girl.

Haven't read Asterios Polyp yet, but The Hunter is just as good as can be, and the Gaiman Batman is just as Gaiman as can be, which means that it's basically a story about telling stories, which is what Gaiman can do in his sleep.

Speaking of sleep? Last night I had this weird dream where I bumped into an old friend I haven't seen in over 10 years, and she freaked out because she thought I was dead. "You changed your e-mail? You got a cellphone? You moved out of that apartment you shared with Georgia? I didn't know any of that -- I thought you were dead!" At which point I woke up at 1 AM and tossed and turned till my alarm went off at 5. I'm still trying to understand what that was all about. Was it the universe telling me I should get back in touch with her? Was it some inner psychic warning that I'm going to bump into her in the next couple of days? Was it all that meditating-on-death crap bubbling up out of my subconscious?

Or was it just this?



I saw Thirst Saturday afternoon. Saying it's a vampire movie would be like saying Oldboy is a revenge flick; there's so much else going on that it's impossible to describe except to say that it's like a Zola novel with bloodsucking. (No lie -- the credits say it's loosely based on Therese Raquin. Accent egue on the loosely.) There are characters in it you so want to like who turn into real shits. There are nervous laughs, creepy tense scenes, and gory gross outs galore, and (thank you, God) in the end, this is actually a vampire movie that equates vampirism with losing your soul. You know, like in the original Dracula and not the romantic neck-rippers where being an undead male means you have just one more emotional issue for women to deal with. In the end, this movie is about love and evil, and why they are not anagrams for each other. Go see it.

This Week in the Celebrity Death Pool

Why are they all SMILING?

Today's ex-parrot: Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense under Johnson and Kennedy. You could go crazy counting all the articles that called him the architect of the Vietnam War, and lose count after 200 or so. All I know is, if this guy was an architect? Our foreign policy would be a collapsed skyscraper. (Oh; wait.)

McNamara is survived by his spiritual son, Donald Rumsfeld, who also belongs to The Church Of Waging War Like You're Running The Ford Motor Company, Except Without Unions. In McNamara's honor, the Pentagon will be holding a traditional Vietnam War Body Count Funeral on Thursday, which will consist of one grave for McNamara and 500 for all the dead bodies of Viet Cong soldiers which somehow vanished in the night.

And because (a) you might have missed it with all the Jacko wackness last week and (b) I can't think of Vietnam without remembering THIS asshole --



-- here's the newest selection from The Nixon Tapes, aka, The Gift That Keeps On Giving:

The tapes also include a phone call from February 1973 between Nixon and the evangelist Billy Graham, during which Mr. Graham complained that Jewish-American leaders were opposing efforts to promote evangelical Christianity, like Campus Crusade. The two men agreed that the Jewish leaders risked setting off anti-Semitic sentiment.

“What I really think is deep down in this country, there is a lot of anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up,” Nixon said.

At another point he said: “It may be they have a death wish. You know that’s been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.”

(Extended excerpts here and you can listen to an MP3 here.)