It was a more than decent weekend for wedding reads, even beyond the Chelsea Clinton and Lisa Simpson news. The Post wrote about a wedding proposal involving a dog in a musical Santa costume. Googling for future blogging turned up the Scrabble proposal NPR's Melissa Block received. Best of the bunch, a Post wedding story ended in the bride and groom's friends reading from Whitman's "Song of the Open Road."
I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
I'd never read the poem before.
Good thing my beloved Poetry Foundation had the full text. I read the work aloud to myself — more like whispered because a louder reading would have slowed me and I wanted to consume it quickly, for myself and for Whitman, whom one can't imagine in his lists and exclamations recited slowly. I had a suspicion the wedding passage was the poem's conclusion, and it was. But my suspicion and minimal surprise at such were rooted in similar reasons, so I wasn't disappointed. On the open road, as so often in Whitman as he's always on an open road of some kind, the journey is more important. Let's see that case at a wedding.
No, really, let's see it. Read us the hard road, prime us for celebration. There are more difficult, unread sections in the poem, parts where you have to keep moving and not let the world's demands get hold of you.
Bring it. Early in the poem, the start of the second section:
You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here,
I believe that much unseen is also here.
Somehow, when I went to the family's house for lunch yesterday, my mom knew Springsteen had shown up at the Pony to jam with a friend. I knew it was high time to post this video, via a taper and Backstreets.
Bruce joined Texas rocker Alejandro Escovedo on stage a week or so ago, and an eight-minute Beast of Burden was the standout. They also played my spring song, Always a Friend, but it was a bit ramshackle. It was with the Stones where Bruce felt comfy. Had he stumbled in from the boardwalk that night, Keith would have approved of these solos.
I mean, come on, try to stay still during this song. Not possible. Try it. It's not possible. Baby, put me out, put me out, put me out of misery…
Another summer goal is complete. Shoot a gun, check. Take a cardio class, check. See the Crime Museum, check. Attend a dog party, check. Drive a high-speed go-kart, check, twice over. And now — appear on a ridiculous single-topic Tumblr, check! Thanks to Hilary for photo skills.
It's been a quiet day today. Farmers' market, family time, catching up on the past few weeks (new job for me, power outage and some trip planning for them), eating delicious lunch (glazed salmon, corn on the cob, blueberry tart), a ton of laundry, dishes, general low key-ness.
In the middle of the day, I ran into friend Jen, roommate of friend Emily, at the neighborhood gas station. It was the first time I'd ever run into someone I knew at a gas station. So strange. But it was good to see Jen. And I realized that while she'd been a great supporter of the blog this year, she'd never appeared in it. So, to make up for that omission, I thought I'd do a post with the video of us running into each other.
I'm the big nerd reading the book. Jen's the one in the helmet.
Today I'm taking it easy, doing laundry, reading, and visiting the fam.
Tomorrow I'm going to an all-you-can-eat pig roast at Bourbon Steak, the Georgetown's Four Seasons restaurant. Fanciness and messiness are going to come in equal portion. The menu looks great. Guests will:
…enjoy as much as they can of a 400-lb wood-roasted Berkawattabaw pig from Eco-Friendly Foods, served with both traditional and non-traditional barbecue sauces. Chef Varley will also offer a host of sides, including Barbecue-baked peanuts, Alan Benton's ham and cheddar biscuits, Country macaroni and cheese, Grilled corn with pimentón and blue cheese butter, and BOURBON STEAK bourbon bacon potato salad.
Guests can also taste one of Varley's winning creations for dessert, Porkeos (chocolate cookies made with lard and filled with whipped lard icing). Other pork-inspired sweets will include Pigalicious cupcakes and Maple bourbon soft serve with bacon sprinkles.
Before going, I'm catching up on the single best pig-based television episode I saw as a child. But you don't have to take my word for it.
A top five unfulfilled childhood dream? Reading Rainbow book reviewer.
I wouldn't say Inception was the first movie to give me a panic attack. The movie didn't get me that far. But it took me about halfway there.
The experiential combination of personal loss, nerves and complication sent me toward a racing head, disorientation and distance. The movie made me believe a panic attack was possible. If you can believe that.
Not everyone has this reaction to the movie. Some friends have hated it. Others have found it your typical summer blockbuster. With sleeping issues since spring, work grabbing most of my head this month, a long legacy* of work dreams, and my usual investment in movie-watching, I was a solid target for Inception. And I saw it sitting sixth-row center at the Uptown. I explained to Meghan the math Spencer had done in high school, and the curving screen, typical for those seats, enveloped us.
So, seriously, go see this movie. Go to the Uptown. Sit near the front. Pay attention and — similar but different — follow along. Let the story get a few levels deep in your head. Inception isn't a four-star film, but it's three-and-a-half and a mental kidnap. Just don't lose yourself in it.
*Last night's dream involved a former colleague telling me my replies to Facebook posts weren't short and punchy enough. That's one for Leonardo DiCaprio, for sure. Dream Jon Burns, I'll get cracking on those replies.
All that Grey's Anatomy-viewing finally paid off. I went to Mat Kearney's show tonight at Sixth and I Historic Synagogue and knew about half a dozen songs, which was about half a dozen more than I expected.
The man played a good, fun show. He hit all the notes from the studio, got creative about how he put the songs across, talked about visiting museums today, questioned the proud weirdness of our District license plate, spun his hat-wearing self-awareness into storytelling and stage presence, and asked who in the crowd could play drums. A kid yelled from the back balcony. Kearney had him run downstairs and gave him an old yellow suitcase to tap a foot on. The kid turned out to be able to rock the beat and some inspired fills (Kearney: "I feel like I've been punked") as Kearney, to finish winning my respect, sang Dancing in the Dark. I should have remembered his Atlantic City cover from last year.
Thank you to Sheri for leading the group outing — I wish I could think of a phrase other than "group outing" because it sounds like now we have to go back to the ward or our cells, but it's late and I'm beat — and thank you to Ella's pizza for being delicious. Also, very cool to see the heralded Sixth and I interior for the first time. Sound was muddy, but the space was friendly and intimate. I'd go back for more shows.
Lastly, because you're wondering the same thing, Wikipedia: "Kearney has stated that his legal name is Mathew due to a nurses error on his birth certificate. He discovered the error while in the 8th grade when he noticed how his mom corrected the error with red ink, never legally correcting it. Since then, he embraced the one T in his legal name."
I'm not afraid to say it. Michael Cera's new Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the best video-game rock action-hero romantic comedy ever made. If graphic novels are responsible for this, I am now more okay with them. Friend Amy is awesome for snagging last-minute preview tix last night.
Young people will enjoy the anti-hero Cera, fighter-style battles, girls kicking ass, and the fact that theatergoers of a certain age just won't understand. There will be a cultural line. If you have dropped quarters into an arcade video game any time post-1990, you will like this movie.
It won't be perfect. Anna Kendrick will be superfluous, and the role for Parks and Rec's Aubrey Plaza will come up short-ish. There will be some loose ends and occasional plot meandering. But you will like the power cords. ex-driven destruction, pictures of a wild script in your head, and the fact that twee alone — for once — cannot win a Michael Cera day.
A caution: As fun as the movie is, you will leave the theater wanting to win back all of your exes at once. You will want to let this feeling pass.
With a book review in The New Yorker this month, Meghan O'Rourke takes another step toward the title. Not yet 35, several years ago O'Rourke was culture editor at Slate. More recently, she's published her poetry — her "Troy" is among those hanging on the side of my fridge — and been a poetry editor at Paris Review. Outside any official title, she has been working through her mother's death and grieving. One of her ways of doing so has been examining how grief happens.
She does so anew in her review of poet Anne Carson's Nox, a book that mourns Carson's brother, who died in 2000. The loss takes torn, innumerable shapes in the book, and O'Rourke serves as interpreter.
"Nox" is as much an artifact as a piece of writing. The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Inside is an accordion-style, full-color reproduction of the notebook, which incorporates pasted-in photographs, poems, collages, paintings, and a letter Michael once wrote home, along with fragments typed by Carson. The reproduction has been done painstakingly, and conjures up an almost tactile sense of the handmade original. A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one, and traces of that scrapbook's physicality–bits of handwriting, stamps, stains–add testimonial force: this person existed.
The analysis joins O'Rourke's look at better grief, her "Long Goodbye" series for Slate (with my favorite part, her grief reading of Hamlet) and plans for a 2011 book on the subject. She's written well — very well — during this period on othertopics, of course. In the latter link, "My Life as a Ruler" is great. But she has taken a kind of ownership on grief.
Not the kind of ownership that is about possession, but the kind that's about responsibility. For an owner to be young, have a poet's sense of observation and take a humble, outward-looking stance on experience is promising for her us, for us and for our difficulties, ultimately shared.
