december 30 and you don't give me love, you give me pale shelter
 
This is a little lesson which proves that Lowrey's law (musta been a friend of Murphy) is not necessarily true. Sayeth Lowrey, "If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway."

I prefer my own law: Don't be so freakin' lazy.

Meet my Scritti Politti CD. (More on them in a minute.) I figured that since it resembled a Pac-Man more than it did a CD, it was safe to scan -- because now it's in the trash. How did it come to this lowly state?

Because I can be goddamned lazy sometimes.

I moved back March. One of my prized possessions -- the kind of thing I wish I had had at age 12, even though CDs didn't exist in the public domain then anyway -- would have been my 200 Disc changer. Gawd, it's things like that (and a flat screen TV, which needless to say is way down the line in my list of actual lust objects I could own) that make me feel like a real capitalist. Think about it: 200 CDs. 200 of your favorite CDs. All lined up like little soldiers on a carousel. Punch in "All CDs" and "Shuffle" and you have got yourself virtually endless, perfect music selection. And no commercials.

Drawbacks (even perfection comes with a few):
1) It's noisy. I used to love falling asleep to music; I wasn't tired when I went to bed, so it was the radio or my headphones or something that finally lulled me to sleep. (Between getting in bed and going to sleep I was doing a Baz Luhrmann ages before that guy ever got the notion for Moulin Rouge!.) In my old apartment, when the stereo was in my bedroom, it was kind of prohibitively noisy to listen to the chhhhhrrrr...... of the last disc played being replaced in the carousel ... the whrrrrrrr ... of the carousel spinning randomly ... and the chhhhrrrr of the new CD going in place. Every four or five minutes. 

Corollary to the noise complaint: I'm old now, and my head hits the bed and I'm asleep in five minutes, 99.8 percent of the time. I coulda really used this as a teen, though -- I would usually be up a half hour to an hour after actually going to bed.
2) It's big. I mean fat and tall. It doesn't sit on a shelf nicely like my receiver, turntable and two-cassette player do. It dangles over the edge.

3) Once you've loaded up all of your favorite CDs and hit "random" for your next party, unless you're someone eternally cool like Russell Crowe or able to pass of anything kooky as somehow retro cool like John Waters, you're going to eventually come across a random embarrassment of music in front of people who you might not want to know that much about you. I know we're all old enough and secure enough in our own musical tastes to listen to whatever we damn well please (Dave Eggers convinced me of that) we still may not want Air Supply to pop on with "Sweet Dreams" the minute the date arrives. (And I will tell you, that did happen.) Heh. 

4) Define "random." One of the main fabulous points of having this CD player on "shuffle" is that -- in my mind -- random would mean "once it has played one song it will not play it again until it has gone through every other song possible currently on the player, at least until the power is turned off and then it can start over again." Clearly, Sony and I differ on this definition. Sony seems to believe that "random" means "the cd player will not remember what it just played and may, actually, play it twice in a row because it is, after all, on random. "Thus, you seem to get songs repeating. And I'm not sure why. I haven't had it so bad that a song played twice in a row, but when you're on a large-scale apartment-cleaning precipitating hours of music, hearing New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle" twice in the same two hour period is, well, obnoxious.

All of that said, it's the best piece of equipment I own, barring my computer. Though sometimes I think the CD player is more intelligent.

Well, so. It's time to move. I have two choices: Unload all 150+ CDs (I don't have it totally filled to capacity) back into their jewel cases individually, then take them all out again and put them all back. Well, that just seemed darn silly. If I packed the CD player securely, then there should be no problems for the short trip from Astoria to Jackson Heights.

At this point, I'm sure my small common sense was saying, "Don't be so goddamned lazy! That's a mistake!"

Well, strangely, the CD player didn't function quite right once I got it to its new location. It kind of worked ... it spun and played and I could open it up and put in new CDs. But it started getting, well, stuck. The carousel wouldn't turn properly. It would go one direction, then the other, then back again, as if shaking its head "no! no!" at me. (I love anthropomorphizing everything.) Then it would go "Err" on the display and refuse to do anything until I shut it off and got it back on again. So I whacked on it. Shook it around. Figured a disc was loose. Then it worked. Then it didn't. Then it made these horrible clacking noises. And never, not once, did I think to myself, "Take the damned CDs out and see what's wrong." Well, maybe I did. But the lazy me overrode my common sense. Lowrey was shouting, common sense was whispering.

Then the VCR broke. Rather, a tape got stuck in it. Which is kind of like having a clock that's stopped -- it works twice a day. Well, I could have resigned myself to only watching "Buns of Steel" for the rest of my life, but refused. Stupid cheap tape in a not-so-stupid, not-so-cheap JVC VCR. So I figured now I had two dysfunctional electronics. The Saturday before Christmas I called Kim's Repair, and the guy came and took the VCR. He was about to take the CD player, but I said (duh) "I'd better take out all of these CDs before you go. 'Cause totaled up, the CDs were worth more than the player.

(Side note: Repair Guy was impressed by the CD collection and asked, "How do you keep track of them all?" in broken English. "Why, I'm a big anal retentive and I alphabetize them all!" I told him. Well, I said the last half. But really. I was in a store of ceramic amusements like big oversized coffee mugs and NY-themed things like a soap dish with a taxi cab running around the edge -- crossed with a street running through the bottom of the dish and a run-over pedestrian ... I have one of those -- called Our Name Is Mud the other day and saw the phrase I coined (well, nobody told it to me; maybe it was a shared meme or something) which basically said I was anal retentive because I was severely lazy [see point of this whole CD story] and didn't want to have to go searching when I wanted that R.E.M. CD posthaste).)

Out came CDs, piled up like doughnuts on my thumb, big stacks. And as they all cleared out -- the carnage was revealed.

Literally wedged in the back there with the motherboard, coated in goopy oil, sat Dionne Warwick's greatest hits. She'd been stuck in there with Scritti and they'd both been menaced by Kenny Rogers' greatest hits, which was the current source of trouble, standing up half in and half out of the carousel. Somewhere in there was a collection of 80s hits, too. Four CDs, not in the carousel, instead stuck and floating around like bad viruses. Shockingly enough, three of the four were cleaned up and restored to their glory in the machine, and currently work fine. Scritti, however, was beyond repair. And I never found the missing chunks. I closed the machine and got it running again (it's on now; Sade is fading out as I type) and thoroughly apologized to the Sony for being such a butthead. I'm like that. I like machine karma.

The moral is: Don't be so goddamned lazy, man.

On a more serious note, I'm having a bit of a snit now with my godmother. She's a lovely lady, and has been my mom's best friend since college, but as per usual, money changes everything. (Thanks, Cyndi Lauper.) Why are people so freaky about money? I know I am, and I can't even explain why. Not having it when I really, really need it has long freaked me out -- to the point where, in college, if I needed say, $10 but only had $19 in my checking account and the ATM refused to give me my own money because it didn't dispense less than $20 bills I had been known to burst out in tears. I also have had a very limited moral compass when it comes to other peoples' money -- while studying abroad in England in the early 90s I "borrowed" some of my roommate's American dollar bills, which she had been given by her boyfriend in case of emergency. I actually did plan on returning the money as soon as my mom arrived about a week later with replenishment funds, and once I was flush again I went out and changed the pounds back to dollars and replaced the money ... but by then it was too late; my roommate had seen the missing funds, then seen them replaced and knew I was at fault. (I might not have been -- we had a third roommate -- but she knew.) And unlike in the movies, she did not confront me in a blaze of screaming and accusations; she just stopped talking to me. And apparently shared this information with everyone else in the dorm, who promptly stopped dealing with me, too. It was horrendous. I was an outcast for the last few weeks of that experience, and it wised me up a lot. Better to do without than risk losing friends over something as stupid, as ultimately false, as money. On the other hand, I felt the punishment (and sharing it with everyone else) was a bit on the extreme side. I did replace the money, even before being outed. 

So. Money and I have not been friends much. (We don't see enough of each other.) And I don't pull that kind of shit any more; I just end up sobbing in front of ATMs. Not for years, though -- having a real job helps; plus, I don't use ATM cards. I know me and money. The easier it is for me to get to, the more likely it is I'll get it. I use a passbook savings account.

Anyway. In order to push me over the hump so I could get this apartment I now live in, my godmother (who it has always been made clear to me is quite comfortable financially and only works because she wants to and wants health insurance, not because she has to) volunteered to loan me $5,000. She made a point of not wanting us to have a formal way to pay the money back, and said again and again that I should take my time, buy some furniture, get the place looking nice. That was back in March. In December, out of the blue, I got an email saying she was "feeling a little poor" and could I make a payment. That was pretty much it.

Let's dissect this:

1) An email? A freaking email? How impersonal can you get? No salutation, no signature, nothing formal, just a "hey, how about forking some of that money back over" note.
2) Out of the blue! With no warning! No "hey, the first of the year, how are you for paying back a percentage," no "let's draw up some kind of terms of repayment."
3) Feeling a little poor? Wal, shit, man, I always feel a little poor. Doesn't pretty much everyone?

I thought about it and the more I did, the angrier I got. I ended up telling her that I couldn't be her ATM, and if that if she wanted to make something formalized, I could probably send her about $200 a month, but that I had planned on sending a big chunk here and there, probably at the start of the year. And if she didn't want anything formal, that she'd have to let me handle it on my own. 

In the meantime, she even mentioned it to my mother! Now, yes, they're friends and have been for decades. But this is one of those things that you don't go discussing with third parties. I'm sorry. That's just ... wrong.

And, of course, it was wrong of me to "borrow" money twelve years ago. I was just shocked by her behavior -- and in retrospect, I'm still mortified at my own. Anybody who says money doesn't change people ... never dealt with not having it, or having it.

So to round out the year, here's a Scritti Politti image. They were just one guy, Green Strohmeyer-Gartside (yes, "Green") and he was a handsome devil, with lots of fluffy blond hair and he was British and ... sigh. He was semi-big in the mid-1980s -- most people know him as the guy who did "Perfect Way." (Other wonderful titles included "Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin), but you had to hear them to really fall in love.) We were so bored in high school Algebra 2 that I turned that song into a ditty called "Perfect Square," which amused my friends to no end. I still got a C+ in the class, though. But his second album was what really grabbed us (the first had the pretentious title of Songs To Remember; the second was Cupid and Psyche '85, for which we had the inside joke of pronouncing "Psyche" as "psych!" or, phonetically, "sike!" as in to "psych" someone out; in order to say the SP album name "correctly" in our language it was Cupid and Psyyyyyyych! [The subjoke of the "psych!" usage was actually -- though not connected to SP -- said like this "Psych, psych big psych, double psych, psych, psych!" a bit like a quarterback would say to his center while calling out plays. God only knows why this was funny, but it was.] I still believe the reason most teen movies can't work properly is that this kind of shit cannot be written properly; it is so touchstone-of-the-pop-moment-inside-joke ridden that to explain would take all the fun out. Oh, and by the way, none of us teens talked the way these yo-yos do on Dawson's Creek. 

So. Scritti Politti. He more or less up and vanished for a couple years after Cupid, then returned with Provision in 1988, then again vanished and returned in 2000 ... with those lovely locks shorn, looking old, proclaiming he did not resemble Princess Diana with his old haircut, and with an album that gave me hives, Anomie and Bonhomie. Apparently, Green had discovered rap about 20 years after everyone else did, and decided to include it -- as well as buzzsaw guitars -- on his newest record. Letdown did not describe it.
 

In other music news, Ivy have appeared on Conan O'Brien! Adam wrote me earlier in the week to alert me (and by extension the list and web page) that they would be appearing -- at least somebody's organized over there; I never heard about the Roswell appearance until after the fact. Hmph.

So the band made their national-talk-show debut on Conan, and naturally I sat down to watch -- and was thoroughly blown away to learn that the guest preceding them on Conan's show was none other than the Comedian With the Best Arms In Showbiz, Marc Maron. I have a fantasy that I'll go see Maron perform at the Gotham one night and while standing out by the bar he'll come up and offer me a drink 'cause he thinks I'm cute and I'll freak him out by going, "You know, the bio on your website still stinks. Let's talk about that."

Sigh. Marc and Adam on the same TV show! I was in beautiful Jew boy heaven. (That's Adam on the near left; Dominique in center, Andy on far left.) The last time I saw Andy was about a week ago at the studio; he hadn't cut his hair or shaved and I told him he had a distinct John Walker look to him. According to Conan, he definitely cleaned up. They're all a very handsome bunch. Unfortunately, Dom's vocals were mixed very low and it took about half of the song for her to not be drowned out.

Well, that's about it for this year. I'm musing on a new design for the site in the new year. With two more days off and no big New Year's plans, it might just happen. I'm still working on the resolutions part of things.