The Tin Man » 2008

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Tomorrow we’re moving to the new apartment. I worked from home today so I could pick up the keys during lunch. (Matt has been crazy busy at work so I volunteered to get the keys. I work in New Jersey and the apartment’s in New York, so it was easier to just stay in the city today.)

Packing is annoying. Matt’s way more stressed about the move than I am, although I’m not what I would call calm. Fortunately, since we knew our current apartment was going to be temporary, we left much of our stuff in boxes. I never unpacked my books or DVDs, so that was one less thing to worry about.

We’ve been really spoiled these last six months. The temporary apartment that Barnard (Matt’s employer) gave us has two bedrooms and two bathrooms and a huge living room. So we’re going to have to downsize again. I know, boo hoo. We told ourselves we wouldn’t let ourselves get spoiled… but we let ourselves get spoiled. Still, it’ll be fine.

Tonight we finish packing, and tomorrow morning the movers come. I was trying to figure out the best way to not be stressed about the move, and I decided that the best way to do that is to not expect perfection. If there are glitches, if we have to pay a little more than we expect, if something breaks, then whatever. It’s not like it’s death.

Wish us luck.

5:09 PM | 4 drops of oil

Saturday, May 3, 2008

We’ve moved! We’re in the new place. The Time Warner guy left about 45 minutes ago, so we have cable and Internet, and I can blog.

The move went off without a hitch. Moving is SO much easier when you pay people to do it for you. We used Rabbit Movers and they did a good job.

I unpacked all my books yesterday, most of which I hadn’t seen in months. I got rid of tons of books last fall, but I still have too many. Last night I’d open a box and find yet more books in it and shake my head. I like having shelves of books, though. They make a home more homey.

It’ll take more time to unpack everything, figure out where it all goes, get curtains, get settled, etc. But eventually this will be home.

11:16 AM | 3 drops of oil

Monday, May 5, 2008

From an article about the upcoming “Sex and the City” movie:

While the film revolves around Carrie and Big’s wedding, Mr. King was insistent that no mother or father of the bride be shown. “My idea always was that these women were purely creations of New York,” he said. “The prototype of the series is that these are four grown-ups who make a family of one another.”

Also driving Mr. King’s decision was his fear of falling into cliché. “Who was going to play Carrie’s mother? Connie Stevens? It’s such a traditional sitcom limb. It’s the Thanksgiving episode, and there are Wilford Brimley and Elaine Stritch. I never wanted to do anything like that.”

I would pay to see Wilford Brimley and Elaine Stritch as anyone’s parents in a sitcom episode.

12:21 AM | 3 drops of oil

How did I never hear that Glenn Scarpelli, my childhood crush from “One Day at a Time,” came out a few years ago?

2:39 PM | 1 drop of oil

If you want to get any more work done today, do not click on this list of YouTube videos. Many of these videos are 9-minute compilations of various TV show openings from 1979 to 1992. This one from 1983 contains “We Got It Made” (sexy maid) and “Jennifer Slept Here” (Ann Jillian as a ghost). This one from 1981 contains “Mr. Merlin” (Merlin’s alive today as an auto mechanic), an obscure sitcom I’d always remembered but had sometimes thought I’d imagined.

You can also see the cast of “One Day at a Time” change through the years.

3:07 PM | oil me

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

I’m pretty sure I saw Paul Krugman on my NJ Transit train this morning. He was sitting across and two seats behind me in a quarter-full car and was typing on a laptop. I know he’s affiliated with Princeton, and he might have been going there — I was on an express train and Princeton was the next stop after Newark.

I’ve disagreed with stuff he’s written about Clinton and Obama lately, but I wouldn’t have known what to say to him.

10:00 AM | oil me

Here are some musings that are not very well organized or polished, are probably naive, and might seem silly to anyone else but me. But I want to get them down.

I was having weird thoughts the other day about television, popular culture, and the passage of time, and particularly, for some reason, the vast gulf between the years 1977 and 1983. This was triggered by these compilations of TV show openings that I discovered on Sunday morning, especially the ones from the early 80s.

Why 1977 and 1983? Perhaps because of the nice symmetry — three years on either side of 1980.

In 1977, we were in the Carter era. In 1983, we were in the Reagan era.

In 1977, “Star Wars” came out. In 1983, we had “Return of the Jedi.” (Side note: a long time ago I found an online list of pop-cultural touchstones - “you know you’re a child of the 80s if…”, or something like that. One of the touchstones: when you saw “Star Wars,” you noticed all the cool spaceships. By the time you saw “Return of the Jedi,” you noticed Princess Leia’s breasts or Han Solo’s tight black pants. I was a little too young for that, being just nine years old for most of 1983.)

It’s weird that most of the TV shows we associate with the ’70s were still on the air in the early ’80s, and aging: Three’s Company, The Jeffersons, Alice, One Day at a Time, Happy Days, Benson, The Love Boat. Inga Swenson’s ’70s bowl cut was replaced by a chic, short ’80s do, and she and Benson were still trading insults. I can’t think of many ’80s shows that lasted into the early ’90s, but for some reason there’s this big ’70s-’80s overlap.

In 1977 there was disco. In 1983, there were personal computers. Remember those Charlie-Chaplinesque commercials for the IBM PC? Disco and PCs seem to belong to totally different eras.

In 1977, gay people seemed to live in a paradise. I think of Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City.” But by 1983, AIDS had begun to destroy the gay community. On the other side of 1980 lay devastation. My fourth-grade mustachioed math teacher (1983-84) would one day die of AIDS.

In 1977, the big thing in television was jiggle TV. Sex abounded. By the early ’80s, the conservative Reagan era was beginning to take hold and kids and families were coming to dominate TV sitcoms again. Diff’rent Strokes, Silver Spoons, The Facts of Life, and Gimme a Break were essentially about blended or nontraditional families; soon the nuclear family would make a comeback with The Cosby Show and Growing Pains, and Family Ties, already on the air in 1982, would become a big hit. Early-80’s TV, with its kid-filled sitcoms, seemed tailor-made for my age group; what would kids have watched in the late ’70s? The Fonz? Laverne & Shirley? (My own kid-centric experience of the early ’80s is no doubt distorting things. There were probably shows of both eras that don’t fit this mold. See Cheers.)

All of these long transitional years led up to what is, for me, the quintessential ’80s year: 1985. In 1985, my friends and I were in fifth grade, the highest grade in the elementary school, so we were sort of the equivalent of high school seniors and felt cool. My favorite movie, “Back to the Future,” came out that year. I discovered comic books. “We are the World” was the big pop-cultural thing and made us all feel happy and uplifted because, if we put our minds together, we could end world hunger!

I think the greatest year of childhood is the final year before you hit puberty. You’ve come to know who you are as a kid; your brain has developed far enough along that you can understand things well; and hormones haven’t yet begun to mess with everything you’ve come to be. In 1977, when I was three years old, we’d moved to the suburbs and into our New Jersey house. By 1985, I was 11. I’d lived in that house in that idyllic suburban town for eight years. It was home, and familiar; I’d grown comfortable in my skin and my school; I’d come to know who I was.

Over the next 2-3-4 years, it all changed. The decade aged. I went on to middle school, I was forced to skip a grade, I started to have troubling sexual feelings. In 1986, Iran Contra would damage the Reagan image and I’d discover “Saturday Night Live,” with its cynical skewering of politicians. In 1987, the stock market would crash. The ’80s seemed to go on forever, but everything after, say, 1986 didn’t feel like the ’80s to me anymore. By 1987, the ’80s were past their prime, like Christmas lights on December 29th. The ’80s for me basically ended in 1985.

I love the idea of people living at the end of the ’70s, on the cusp of the ’80s, not knowing what was in store. Hedonism would be replaced by conservatism. Self-actualization would be replaced by money. Wide neckties would be replaced by skinny ties. Disco clubs would be replaced by clubs where Wall Street Masters-of-the-Universe types would order expensive bottles of champagne.

Every decade grows old and encrusted before the people who have lived it move en masse into the next era. The people of 1977 found themselves living in a different world six years later — just as the people of 1997 would barely recognize the mood of 2003 (with the intervening impeachment, election recount, dot-com crash, and massive terrorist attack).

Ah, the passage of time.

1:50 PM | 6 drops of oil

Related to my previous post: here are my two favorite ABC-TV jingles ever, from 1981 (“Now is the Time, ABC is the Place”) and 1982 (“Come on Along with ABC”). These promo spots are filled with TV stars and the tunes are just so damn catchy.

TV networks would never spend money like this today, and this wonderful schmaltz would never fly in our irony-dominated age.

3:28 PM | 1 drop of oil

Glory Days, the new musical about four college friends, has closed after opening night. One official performance. The reviews were pretty miserable. We saw one of the preview performances a couple of weeks ago; it was a cute show (with cute guys), earnest and somewhat poignant, but it didn’t belong on Broadway.

The songs aren’t bad. You can hear some of them on the show’s MySpace page.

(The last show to close after one performance was The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, a one-woman show starring Ellen Burstyn five years ago. But at least both those shows opened, unlike Bobbi Boland, starring Farrah Fawcett, which closed in previews.)

10:36 PM | 1 drop of oil

Thursday, May 8, 2008

From the Times:

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the speaker of the House, was among those on Wednesday giving Mrs. Clinton room to make her own calculations about the race, saying “a win is a win,” in reference to the Indiana results.

This is something that has annoyed me throughout this nomination process. A win isn’t a win. There’s no such thing as “winning a state” in the Democratic nomination process, or rather, there’s no real importance to winning a state, since states aren’t winner-take-all. These primary nights are not about winning a state; they’re about adding proportional chunks of delegates to running totals. But to the news media, that’s not quite as exciting.

News anchors were up past midnight waiting to see whether Obama or Clinton had won Indiana, when it really only meant the difference of one or two delegates out of 2,000. The media is used to covering winner-take-all presidential elections, and they’re wedded to the concept of “calling a state” for one candidate or another. Determining a “winner” creates news. But it’s inaccurate to say that “winning a state” matters in anything but a symbolic sense.

11:57 AM | 1 drop of oil

Other Jeff linked to this video of the end of last week’s Brothers and Sisters, where Kevin proposes to his boyfriend Scotty. I got all teary watching it again. I’m such a creampuff.

12:21 PM | 4 drops of oil

Friday, May 9, 2008

This Times editorial says something silly that I’ve also seen elsewhere.

There is a lot of talk that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now fated to lose the Democratic nomination and should pull out of the race. We believe it is her right to stay in the fight and challenge Senator Barack Obama as long as she has the desire and the means to do so. That is the essence of the democratic process.

Will people stop using this straw man? Has anyone ever said she has no right to continue campaigning? No.

I have the right to wear a clown suit to work every day. But if someone says “You shouldn’t wear a clown suit to work every day,” and I respond by saying, “But I have the right to do it,” that doesn’t really address the point. “I can if I want to” is rarely a useful answer to anything. It’s what a five year old says.

The question isn’t whether Clinton has the right to continue campaigning. Of course she does. The question is whether it serves any purpose. Me, I don’t care if she continues campaigning or not, as long as she stops bringing the likely nominee down with her. Also, superdelegates are allowed to change their minds as many times as they want until the convention at the end of August, and since neither candidate will reach a majority without superdelegates and Obama could still somehow collapse over the next three and a half months, she’s there as a backup.

But she’d be there as a backup anyway. Maybe the best thing for her to do is not end her campaign, but “suspend” it, right after the Montana and South Dakota primaries on June 3. At that point, there won’t be anyone left but superdelegates to convince, and while it’s unlikely a publicly-declared superdelegate will have a change of heart, she can still be there as a backup in case Obama falls apart.

Side note: how weird is it that Puerto Rico has more delegates than Montana and South Dakota combined, and more delegates than Kentucky alone, but Puerto Ricans don’t get to vote for president?

10:54 AM | 3 drops of oil

Monday, May 12, 2008

This is a great video about how yogurt is marketed to women. It has some very funny moments. [via Salon]

2:16 PM | 1 drop of oil

Howard Kurtz writes about one of my political crushes, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd.

On a cable channel packed with such opinionated personalities as Olbermann and Chris Matthews, Todd stands out by not being flamboyant. While others are getting punch-drunk on polls, New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley observed, Todd is “the designated driver of MSNBC’s political coverage.”

He is accustomed to the role. During his boyhood in Miami, Todd recalls, his conservative father and a liberal cousin often got sloshed and argued about politics.

Todd was 16 when his dad died. Strapped for cash, Todd was accepted by George Washington University on a music scholarship — he played the French horn — and pursued a double major in politics.

Longtime friend Andrew Flagel, now George Mason University’s dean of admissions, says Todd had phenomenal recall, “whether it had to do with every sports fact you could ever have at your fingertips or every congressional race. He was the Jimmy the Greek of politics. We’d be out at one of the bars in Georgetown or Foggy Bottom and he’d end up with 20 people around us, arguing about either politics or sports, and he’s emceeing the discussion.”

2:40 PM | oil me

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Inspired by Jere’s recent post, I tried out yesterday for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. I applied online a couple of weeks ago and was scheduled for a tryout yesterday after work. I also received via email a list of open-ended questions to fill out, presumably in order to elicit interesting facts about me.

So I went to the ABC offices yesterday for my tryout. It was similar to Jere’s — a large group of people taking a 10-minute, 30-trivia-question multiple-choice Scantron test in an ABC cafeteria. The guy sitting next to me was a burly, middle-aged, gray-goateed man with a thick Boston accent who seemed like he’d do well on TV.

A portion of us passed the test, including me. Everyone who passed had a Polaroid picture taken and was ushered to another part of the cafeteria, where we sat at round tables to await a short interview with one of seven interviewers, who were lined up at seven adjacent two-person tables along one wall. We were told that some people might have second interviews but that that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

While waiting for my interview, I noticed that one woman was picked for a second interview, which was taped by a video camera. She was a smartly-dressed 30-something Asian-American woman with a very cute smile; I could hear her speak, and she sounded utterly charming, talking about how she watches the show every day and how when she told her four-year-old daughter that she was going to try out, her daughter said, “So you might get a chance to be in the hot seat?” She seemed like a very promising contestant. I knew I didn’t have half her charisma and I felt envious.

Eventually my name was called by one of the interviewers. The interviewer gave off a definite gay vibe. On my application I’d mentioned that I sing in a gay men’s chorus, and when the interviewer got to that part, he said, “What chorus do you sing with?” I told him which one, and he said he knew a particular person in the chorus. I asked him some questions to see if it was the same person, and it was. He even knew that this is a busy week of rehearsals for us. And then he said, “Well, this isn’t awkward at all, is it?” and got all flustered and remarked that his face was probably bright red. I said, “I can’t tell at all — it blends right into the red in the upholstery of the seat behind you!” I don’t know why he was nervous when I was the one trying out for a game show. Maybe he and the chorus member are dating? I don’t know.

Anyway, he told me I’d get a postcard in the mail in a couple of weeks informing me of whether I’d be entered into the contestant pool. I’m guessing probably not. No matter — it was at least fun to try out and prove to myself that I could pass the qualifying test.

Guess this means I have to pay off the rest of my student loan the old-fashioned way.

2:39 PM | 2 drops of oil

I can watch this forever.

I think you have to be a New Yorker to fully appreciate it — you might even have to have grown up in the New York area. Sue Simmons and Chuck Scarborough have hosted the local news on Channel 4 for as long as I can remember. To hear Sue Simmons swear on the air — particularly with such vehemence — is, well… I was going to say delightful, but that’s not quite the word.

Maybe I just mean awesome.

(As a commenter on Gothamist said, “I think I’ve found my new ringtone.”)

10:36 PM | 5 drops of oil

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Appalachia hearts Hillary. And not just in West Virginia. Intriguing analysis, and the matching maps do seem to make the point. Whether there’s another factor, I don’t know.

1:01 AM | 5 drops of oil

danny strong

In a week and a half, HBO is airing a TV movie called Recount, about the 2000 Florida recount. Sounds interesting enough, although some people are criticizing the movie for portraying Gore team member (and former Secretary of State) Warren Christopher as too much of a wimp.

Even more intriguing: the writer of the screenplay happens to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Danny Strong, a.k.a. Jonathan Levinson.

10:58 AM | 1 drop of oil

Oh my god. The California Supreme Court has announced that it’s going to issue its decision on same-sex marriage equality tomorrow, 10 a.m. California time, 1 p.m. Eastern.

I’m going to be on pins and needles.

(Here’s the official notice.)

5:16 PM | 3 drops of oil

Thursday, May 15, 2008

To my readers in the New York area: my chorus is performing two concerts this weekend with the Astoria Symphony, one on Saturday night on the Upper West Side and another on Sunday afternoon in Long Island City (Queens). We’re singing mostly modern music, including the premiere of a piece by legendary Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici called Queer Hosannas. We’re also performing Arnold Schoenberg’s Survivor From Warsaw, about a survivor of the Holocaust; the beautiful Brahms Alto Rhapsody; and a piece by former chorus member Stefan Weisman called David and Jonathan, about the biblical pair who some have presumed to have been lovers.

Saturday night at 8pm:

The Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew
263 West 86th Street
Manhattan

Sunday afternoon at 3pm:

LaGuardia Performing Arts Center
31-10 Thompson Ave.
Long Island City, Queens

Hope some of you can make it!

10:02 AM | oil me

Table of Democratic superdelegates’ declared candidate preferences, sortable by date of declaration.

10:35 AM | oil me