While honored and flummoxed to have set off such a brush fire — a compound noun, that — with her grammar woes, Sherry Ann has requested that I kindly clarify some remarks from last night’s post.
Her take on the situation is as follows:
“Please let everyone know I was capable of doing my own homework. I was just unmotivated!”
And, of course, my rebuttal:
“That crazy heifer only wishes she could have survived Calculus and AP Chemistry II without me! Can you say pie in the sky?”
My best friend on this planet, the wondrous Sherry Ann — every ounce of whose homework, it must be noted, she copied verbatim off of my paper, from the eighth grade forward — most randomly had me diagramming sentences via text message today (don’t ask), and she presented me with an interesting conundrum which continues to haunt me hours later.
Word for word, the question she posed:
“In the sentence ‘He had a paper clip,’ is ‘paper clip’ a noun? Or is ‘paper’ an adjective describing ‘clip’?”
I immediately answered back that ‘paper clip’ was a noun, but then I started thinking, is this a trick question? Half a day past, I’m still wondering.
“Sometimes you write about the exact thing you saw, but other times you take something that happened over here and put it with something over there…. It’s a hybrid, but all together, it makes a whole truth.”
— the ever-estimable Joni Mitchell, vehemently disabusing Mojo Magazine of the notion that she is a “confessional” songwriter
Sixteen years ago this August, an astonishing flame-haired raven name of Tori Amos cajoled her incomparably seductive self into my life and instantaneously hurled my very being straight and plumb off its axis. For reasons that aren’t remotely relevant to this particular conversation — though they merit (and will almost certainly eventually win) their own future blog post — 1992 remains, in its own way, the single most important and noteworthy of my 32 years on this planet. Thanks wholly to unrequited, emotionally draining crushes on Craig Doughten and Annie Lennox — and, all these eons later, it remains a fair toss-up which of those two people was more unattainable, despite my daily access to no fewer than one of them — it was the first year I got really serious both about writing and about music appreciation. Quite true, I had always loved music — hey, I still remember, and with the fondest grace in my heart’s most sacred quadrant, Dad driving his downright giddy eight year old son up to the TG&Y to buy anything that contained “Karma Chameleon,” and trust me here if nowhere else: yes, Brooke, an eight year old’s palms can sweat, honey — but ’92 tore across my mind like a gale, like an huracán.
A pitched a hissy fit over the Michael J. Fox quotation, so let’s see how this one grabs him.
From one of American cinema’s great classics, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion:
Romy: “All right, according to this chart, if we wanna lose a pound a day, we have to burn twice as many calories as we eat. So that means if we wanna burn 4000 calories, we only have to run twenty miles a day!”
Michele: “Oh! Hey Romy, remember Mrs. Shivitz’s class? There was, like, always a word problem. Like, there’s a guy in a rowboat going X miles, and the current is going, like, you know… some other miles, and… how long does it take him to get to town? It was like, ‘Who cares? Who wants to go to town with somebody who drives a rowboat?!'”
It may strike all you cynics in this crowd as a wee bit Pollyanna-ish for its own damn good, but I recently read an Entertainment Weekly interview with Kimberly Peirce (the director of Boys Don’t Cry and the new Stop-Loss), and weeks after the fact, its climax continues to resonate with me. In a summation on the frivolity and fickleness of fame, Peirce offers this:
“You’ve got to let go of the fear of failure. You’re going to fail and you’re going to succeed, and you’re going to fail and succeed again. Someone doesn’t take the score and then you’re done… You’re done when you’re dead. Until then, the game is still on.”
All we need, sometimes, is something simple to cling to.
I never really cottoned to you or your pretentious tattoos. (As one of the three hundred (!) people you bought your debut album seven years ago, I have yet to forgive you for your wobbly, pitchless cover of Danielle Brisebois’ shamefully underappreciated classic “Just Missed the Train.”) And I found your thoroughly atrocious desecration of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” a few weeks back to be unconscionable. And I mistrust entirely anybody whose singing accent is diametrically opposed to their speaking accent.
Still, strangely, seeing you go this evening broke my heart into eighteen pieces, especially since your too-early exit means that foppish Jason survives another week. If that dreadlocked fool subjects us to a sleepy take on “Red, Red Wine” or “Love on the Rocks” during Neil Diamond night next Tuesday, I’m personally holding you and your Judas complex responsible.
No doubt it’s already all over YouTube and any number of other online video portals, but, to commemorate the long-awaited domestic release of the divine George Michael’s new comprehensive greatest hits set TwentyFive — about which a blog post is imminent — VH1 Classic is airing in a regular rotation Michael’s landmark 1996 appearance on “MTV Unplugged.”If, like myself, you were horrified and outraged by (the usually dependable) Carrie Underwood’s heinously overblown performance of Michael’s 1990 tour de force “Praying for Time” on that “Idol Gives Back” special a few weeks back, you must check out the masterfully intimate way George reinvents his own smash live:using a deceptively plain piano accompaniment, a string section worthy of the Met, and a viper’s parched precision, Michael takes what began as a bitter slam against greed and gluttony and transforms it into a wrenching, impossibly riveting elegy for ceded innocence.It is haunting, spectacular theater, and nothing short of same.
I recently (and completely unintentionally) offended — and to the very depths of his captivating, baying soul, no less — the love of my life.
He’ll no doubt post a comment under this — the inaugural post of my spankin’ new blog — and emphatically deny all of what I’m preppin’ to tell you, but you have to trust me here:he didn’t speak to me for a solid week over this incident.
Back up.
His name is A.(That’s a lie, of course, but in the choppy wake of said incident, I have been forbidden from using his real name, even though I’ve repeatedly (and futilely) insisted that the only people who are going to be reading this and taking it anywhere close to seriously already know and love him profusely, faults and all.)He is a fixed income analyst out in Calla-forny.Lives right in the heart of downtown La-La Land.Rollerblades from the boardwalk in Santa Monica to the southern edge of Venice Beach, and back, for fun.Goes to CPK and orders salad.Possesses the most gorgeous, most eminently kissable dimples on either side of his criminally sculpted abdomen.Is gorgeous and eminently kissable (Lord Jesus, can that boy buss!) in ways irrespective to his trunk and its musculature.
