Peripatetic

…is “30 Rock.” Or more accurately, it’s the best thing on broadcast TV. (The best thing on TV is “The Wire,” even when it’s between seasons, as it is now.)

I never expected to like this show. I haven’t watched “Saturday Night Live” in years—decades, even—so I don’t know Tina Fey from a chair; I’m very, very picky about comedy, and in particular, I have limited patience with sitcoms and usually burn out on them after about half a season. But the show is comic genius. Alec Baldwin has been getting a lot of accolades for his performance, and deservedly so—his delivery is so spot on that nearly everything he says is hilarious—but the rest of the cast is also excellent. It’s the only sitcom that has ever sent me scurrying over to TelevisionWithoutPity to look for posts quoting lines from the episode that has just aired.

Seriously, if you’re not watching this show, you’re missing out.

(On the other hand, I recommend avoiding the heavily hyped new Paul Haggis show, “The Black Donnellys,” like the plague. Unless you enjoy watching one-dimensional, anachronistic Irish-American stereotypes stealing things and getting into fights, that is.)

An amazing thing happened the other night. Unfortunately, it won’t sound amazing to anyone who isn’t a knitter, because it was a knitting thing. And it probably won’t sound terribly amazing to most knitters, either, because in the greater knitting scheme of things, it’s not any kind of big deal.

But it was a big deal to me, boy howdy. Over on the LiveJournal knitting community that I belong to, there are a lot of knitters who express their fear of various non-beginner tools and techniques, like cabling (which I did on my very first knitting project, not knowing any better, and which I love), or double-pointed needles (which I haven’t tried yet), or even circular needles (which I find no more difficult to use than the straight kind). I dunno, I guess I’m just not a fearful knitter. I’m afraid of fire, and rats, and electricity; I am not afraid of knitting, as a general rule. (Although I freely admit that steeking—a technique used most often for Fair Isle knitting that involves actually cutting your knitting with a scissors—intimidates the hell out of me, mainly because I can’t cut straight. But I digress.) I like trying new things when I knit. I could maybe stand to like new things a little less, in fact, and spend more time on actually finishing something more challenging than a scarf, but that’s another matter.

But there was a particular technique that I was ready to embrace and just simply could not get the hang of: the Möbius cast-on invented by Cat Bordhi. I wanted to learn it so that I could make one of the adorable felted cat beds in Cat’s Second Treasury of Magical Knitting, and after I got the book, I knew that I also had to make one of her amazing Möbius scarves. So I bought the book, and its predecessor, way back in March or so, ordered some lovely and affordable wool from KnitPicks and a long Addi Turbo circular needle for the cat bed pattern, and sat down to knit.

And I couldn’t figure out the cast on to save my life, despite the clear, illustrated instructions. Which was going to make it pretty hard to knit anything from the book, if I couldn’t even get past the cast on.

It should be noted here that Möbius knitting is not entirely intuitive for many people; no less a knitting celebrity than Stephanie Pearl-McPhee was awestruck by it, though of course she mastered it a lot faster than I did. A recent Web search found oodles of posts on various lists and blogs from people who had trouble with it, including plenty who couldn’t get past the cast on either.

Which is comforting, but I was still stumped. I put the book and needle aside for a little while, but it bugged me that I couldn’t figure it out. I’m still only an advanced-beginner-to-intermediate knitter, but so far, I’ve been able to figure out most new techniques after a try or three. But not this. A month or two later, I found a Yahoo Group devoted to Cat’s Magical Knitting, joined right up, and asked for advice and tips. I got quite a bit of help, including two long offlist posts from a very generous person who explained the cast on to me in painstaking detail. I read the posts carefully, many times, and thought I’d seen the light, but no luck. Then Cat Bordhi herself posted to the list, expressing her sympathy to me and offering an alternate explanation, a metaphorical one that she says is what she now uses when she does her workshops. The metaphor made sense to me, and I thought I’d finally cracked it, but…no.

Summer came, and even in the best of times, I don’t knit as much in the summer—and this past summer was unquestionably not the best of times. So Möbius knitting fell by the wayside again. Meanwhile, the lone knitted cat bed in the house—the Princess Snowball one from Stitch ‘n’ Bitch, which was fun to knit and is quite lovely and should not be slighted just because I’m intrigued by the Möbius one—became Jasper’s preferred place to sleep and got dusty and gray, which highlighted the desirability of making another cat bed so that the first one could go in the washing machine at some point. So when fall came around, I made another attempt at the cast on. I did some more searches and found still another alternate explanation—this one from the DIY Network, which (I learned belatedly, to my chagrin) had aired an episode featuring Cat Bordhi demonstrating the Möbius technique. (I even put a note in my work calendar to remind me to record the re-airing, in November, figuring that if all else failed, maybe I could master it then.) This third explanation had me thinking that I was doing it right for a whole hour or so, until I finally looked at the yarn on my needle and realized that there was no way it could be right. Argh.

Then on Wednesday night, while I was watching the ho-hum finale of a truly disappointing season of “Project Runway” (which had been my principal obsession earlier in the year, when the wonderful second season aired), I decided to look at Cat’s metaphor post again and try it out. And this time, something clicked. A single phrase in particular clicked, in fact, which seems ironic after the large number of words I’ve ingested on the topic. The phrase described the needle leaning on the yarn in one part of the cast on movement, and I suddenly understood what I’d been doing wrong on every other attempt, and lo and behold, I got the whole thing down. Hallelujah.

(It turns out that once you master it, it’s an extremely fast and easy cast on. Figures.)

Of course, my successful attempt was done using some scrap yarn that I had sitting around, and I don’t actually want to knit anything from that yarn, so I undid it before I could think to take a quick photo for posterity. So I have nothing to show for my efforts yet. But I will, I hope, soon.

My other cool discovery of the week is Shelfari. I don’t quite know why a social networking site based on books is of more value to me than all the other social networking sites out there (except for MySpace, which I love for the quick access to new music, not for the social networking, which I barely pay attention to), but it is. I’ve already learned about five or six books that I’d never heard of before, and I only joined a few days ago. Book clubs never appealed to me, because I don’t particularly enjoy analyzing books closely; it’s partly why I ended up not being an English major in college. But I do value recommendations from people with compatible tastes in books, and this appears to be a significantly more accurate and less intrusive way of getting them than, say, Amazon’s utterly useless recommendations.* It’s not a perfect system; I saw a big spike in the number of people who have some of the same books as I do when I added The Complete Calvin and Hobbes to my “shelf,” because it counts that as 11 books. But it seems pretty solid so far.

If this post has bored you to tears, just be grateful that I’m not posting about cat colons. Miss Maisy had hers removed—the whole thing, seriously—last week and is now in messy recovery mode, so I’m a little preoccupied with that topic at the moment.

*I could write volumes about Amazon’s pathetic recommender system, which is a bit of an obsession of mine. I have to concede that I do find some value, albeit just the tiniest bit, in Amazon’s recommendations for knitting books, because it means that I find out about forthcoming ones that I might not otherwise discover…though since I’m not really allowed to buy anything knitting-related until I use up some of the yarn in my stash, all the recommendations are really useful for is making my Amazon wishlist longer. And I still get recommendations for IA/user experience books, though that’s pretty useless since I tend to find out about those without Amazon’s help. But using Amazon recommendations for anything less easily categorized, like music (which I’m still convinced can be categorized, just not by the methods that Amazon uses) or fiction, yields comically terrible results, as I’m sure everyone knows by now. And even things that should be categorizable don’t work that well. For example, I recently bought a large, comprehensive book on bread-baking, something I’ve been wanting to try my hand at for a while now. So of course as soon as I put it in my shopping cart, I got recommendations for 10 more large, comprehensive books on bread-baking. Cookbooks do tend to breed more cookbooks, but I really don’t think I’m ever going to need that many books on bread…and certainly not two minutes after deciding to order just one. Needless to say, I unchecked “Use to make recommendations” for bread books as soon as I could, just as I do with nearly everything I buy from Amazon. And yet I can’t resist playing with the recommendations regularly, just so I can exclaim over their absurdity. It’s sort of like picking at a scab, I guess.

Yeah, I know, maybe not ever. But this was a rare year in which I actually saw more than one of the movies nominated for Best Picture; I saw two, one excellent (”Good Night, and Good Luck”) and one abysmal (”Crash”). So of course, the abysmal one wins…and the really good one gets completely shut out of the awards. And Jon Stewart, though he started strong, wasn’t nearly as funny as he should have been. At least the Supporting Actor and Actress award winners were worthy; I didn’t see “Syriana,” though I will eventually, but George Clooney is always great in whatever he does, and Rachel Weisz was superb in the slight but effective “Constant Gardener.” (Ralph Fiennes was typically excellent also, though I guess it was too minor a movie for him to merit a Best Actor nomination.)

I don’t usually care much about award shows, though I almost always watch the major movie and TV and country music ones (I haven’t watched the Grammys in more than 25 years, and I find it surprising when people with similar musical tastes do watch them, because they have so little to do with most of what we listen to). As I said, it’s a rare year in which I’ve seen even one of the nominated films, because over the years I’ve become less and less of a moviegoer (or even DVD-watcher); somewhere along the line, I stopped being all that much of a movie fan. Besides, there’s usually other stuff on TV on Sunday nights, so that I miss most of the Oscar show. But this year I watched the whole thing, and I didn’t for one second believe that “Crash”—seriously one of the worst major motion pictures that I’ve ever seen—would win. I was sure it would be “Brokeback Mountain,” which cornered a majority of the other non-acting awards. I haven’t seen “Brokeback” and don’t have much desire to (mainly because it’s based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx, whom I consider a truly dreadful writer, the worst sort of earnest middlebrow shlock with literary pretentions), but I’d have been much happier if it had won rather than “Crash.”

What’s so awful about “Crash”? Oh, I dunno. Is it the hamfistedness of its “message”? Is it the ugliness of every single one of the characters? Is it the way that it purports to make us confront our fears and prejudices while actually sort of glorifying them? Um, yeah. That and a whole bunch more. (And I like Paul Haggis, who created one of my favorite TV shows ever, “E-Z Streets”…though in retrospect, that show was pretty heavy-handed too. But it had a sense of dark humor, something that is completely lacking from “Crash”).

It’s hard for me to describe how much I hated “Crash,” from the very first scene on, and why, so I’ll let Andrew O’Hehir do it for me. From Salon:

Look, it’s not like “Crash” is a war crime or something. A lot of the acting is quite good, and the honorable intentions of this achingly earnest sermon (”Racial Pain: Los Angeles, America, the World?”) are obvious. But it’s exactly the kind of portentous, piss-elegant middlebrow trash that many critics (and, unhappily, many viewers) see as Important Cinema. The only difficult part about identifying the preaching and speech-making in “Crash” is finding the places when it stops. No one in this movie ever talks like an identifiable human being, starting with the notorious early scene where two young African-American men who are about to carjack the L.A. district attorney get into a philosophical argument about the prevalence of white racism. (I had high hopes for that scene when it appeared they might have to shoot Sandra Bullock’s eterna-whiny rich-bitch character. After that, it was all downhill.)

I should have just skipped the Oscars and watched “The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (which I have out from Netflix at the moment) instead.

Okay, maybe “mania” is a little bit of an overstatement. I don’t read nearly as quickly as I used to, and I don’t seem to have had much time to read lately, so this list contains only a paltry four books. But in my defense, the book I just finished—the third one on the list below—was something like 550 pages long. (Actually, 560. I just checked.) And the other three are nonfiction, which always takes me longer to read than fiction does (especially since I go through long stretches during which the only fiction I read is Brit-chick-lit and mysteries. Intelligently written mysteries, mind you—and the next time I’m reading one, maybe I’ll do a roundup of the Best Mystery Writers According to Me—but still not huge brain challengers.)

Anyway. With no further excuses, herewith four books that have floated my boat recently.

1. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?. I have now officially determined that I am not, in fact, the last leftist in the Yew Ess Ay to read this book, but I still wish I’d read it sooner. Yeah, Frank tends to reiterate his points just a little too much, and yeah, I’m in fundamental agreement with Michael Bérubé’s criticisms of Frank’s assessment of the culture wars. But it’s still a terrific book, and since I’m right next door to Kansas, it was an especially interesting read for me. And Frank is a skillful and engaging writer. (I love nonfiction books that have notes that are every bit as worthy of reading as the text itself.) It won’t exactly cheer anybody up, but it’s a very cogent analysis of some of the reasons that so many regular ‘muricans vote against their economic self-interest and how the wingnut establishment, political and journalistic, make sure they keep doing so.

2. Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Considerably less likely to cheer anybody up, but an essential and deeply disturbing read. Kozol comes up with so many statistics and so much research that it would be almost impossible to dispute his arguments about the state of public education and the effects of de facto resegregation on minority students in poorly funded schools. He exposes the No Child Left Behind program for the sham that it is and points out the essential cynicism at its core. And he brings to life some exceptional children who are, in fact, being left behind by the resegregation of public schools. A good polemic can be a real inspiration to its readers, and that’s exactly what this book is, an excellent and impassioned polemic, like his other books; Kozol isn’t a particularly good prose stylist, but he doesn’t have to be, because what he has to say is so compelling by itself that his plain writing style works just fine. It’s a massively frustrating read, because you want to do something, anything after reading it, and it’s not clear what any one individual can do, particularly one who, like me, doesn’t have kids. And sadly, I wasn’t terribly surprised by any of Kozol’s facts and statistics—just disappointed and troubled.

3. Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife. I admit that I had to get past my knee-jerk snobbery when I got the paperback edition of this magnificent debut novel out of the library and saw that it was both a Today Show Book Club choice and a People magazine book of the year…and you should too, because it’s a really remarkable book. Clare and Henry are a Chicago couple, eight years apart in age. He’s a librarian, she’s an artist. They are normal (I use the word here in the sense of “more or less like me,” not to mean “ordinary”) intelligent people with good taste in music and books and food and friends…and oh yeah, Henry just happens to time-travel, unpredictably and uncontrollably, both backward and forward in time; he sometimes even meets an older or younger version of himself. (He has “chrono-displacement disorder,” which the author treats as a real syndrome.) Clare first meets him when she is six and Henry is in his forties (since he hops around so much in time, he is sometimes much more than eight years older than she is), in the meadow near her family’s house in South Haven, Michigan, and he writes down all the dates when he will return. He’s reluctant to tell her much about what’s going to happen in their future, but she eventually learns that they’ll get married. It’s a love story. The story jumps around in time in somewhat the same way that Henry does, and all of it is delightful, though some of it is also heartbreaking. Niffenegger is a terrific writer; it’s hard to believe that this is her first novel, because she’s so skillful and her writing so fluent. (And her pop-culture references rang very true to me; I suspect she’s not far from my own age.) It’s a little sentimental, and the time travel doesn’t hold up to extremely close scrutiny, but that doesn’t matter, because the characters are so charming and so real (flaws included) and the story is so full and rich. One of my favorite novels in a long time.

4. Laura Mac Donald, The Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Disaster of 1917. This is a qualified plug, because I’m only 125 pages or so into the book. (But I read all 125 of those in the space of a few hours yesterday, and I can’t wait to get back to it tonight.) It’s about a 1917 disaster that was completely unfamiliar to me, probably because I don’t know much about Canadian history: a giant ship carrying large quantities of highly combustible explosives and gas was plowed into by another large ship in the narrow and dangerous channels of Halifax Harbour in Halifax-Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The explosion and subsequent tsunami killed 2000 people in a city with a population of about 60,000, left 9000 people homeless, and did hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a thing for shipwreck stories (and natural-disaster stories too, though it’s hard to imagine being able to enjoy a pure natural-disaster story right now, so soon after Katrina), and this is a remarkably good one. Mac Donald is kind of a clunky writer, but not so much so that her writing gets in the way of the story, which is so remarkable (not least because it’s amazing that anyone survived to describe the incident) that it almost tells itself.

I’m not sure what I’m going to read when I’m done with Curse of the Narrows. I have a smallish stack of books that I actually bought—something I prefer not to do with fiction—including some Brit-chick-lit, a mystery, a nicely boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia (I still hope to re-read at least the first one before the movie comes out), and one of my three* favorite books of all time: Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, which I haven’t read in at least ten years. I might read that one first, unless I pick up a bunch of random books at the library, which is what usually happens.

Oh, and an NPIMH (that’s “now playing in my head”): The traditional song “Moorlough Shore,” as sung by Caroline Lavelle. I’m familiar with this song because it was played repeatedly and to excellent, haunting effect on “E-Z Streets,” one of my favorite TV shows of the last decade or so, and one of the darkest ever. The Trio channel read my mind and added it to their “Brilliant But Canceled” series last fall, so I got to see most of it again for the first time in ten or twelve years or so. It didn’t make quite as strong an impression on me the second time around (probably because I’ve since seen even darker shows, like “The Wire”), but it was still very powerful…even though the idea of Ken Olin (who looks remarkably like my oldest brother, at least in some shots) as an Irish Catholic is pretty comical. Anyway, the pilot was on again a few weeks ago, and I was finally able to catch enough of the lyrics to the song to make a reasonable Google search out of it. I tracked the song title down that way, and then looked the song up at Allmusic.com, which listed only three recordings of it. A little trial and error led me to the correct version, by Ms. Lavelle, an English cellist and singer of whom I was previously unaware, even though she’s sung with Massive Attack and I was something of a fan of theirs for a while. Some reviews compared her to Enya (yikes!), but then I saw others that explained why that wasn’t a reasonable comparison, so I bought a used copy of “Spirit,” the CD that “Moorlough Shore” appears on. Most of it is a little too trippy and ethereal to qualify as My Thing (though mercifully, she doesn’t sound anything like Enya), but I’ve been listening to “Moorlough Shore” over and over and over again. She has a beautiful, dusky, low voice, and the weird cello and her eerie vocal make it a very distinctive and completely haunting treatment of a traditional song. She’s got a record on eMusic that has more of the traditional stuff, so I might grab that, I guess. Not sure I’ll ever become a real fan, but the CD was well worth the purchase price just for the one song alone.

*One of my three favorite books of all time is actually three books, so I guess I should say my favorite five books of all time. The three are the books in Edna O’Brien’s “Country Girls” trilogy: The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss. (Just typing the titles makes me want to read them again.) And the remaining one of the five is Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres. In case anyone was wondering.

I’m not sure if I’m experiencing a bout of unexpected nostalgia or if I’ve simply entered a time warp in which it is suddenly the late 1970s. This morning, I was browsing my regularly delivered bit of permission-based spam from BBCAmerica, and I noted that they were advertising the DVD of the first season of Butterflies. So I bought it. (Being an inveterate spender of money online, I also noted that DeepDiscountDVD.com had it for about $10 less, so I bought it there, of course. BBCAmerica does pretty good spam e-mails, but their shopping site is limited and kind of ludicrously overpriced.) This comes on the heels of my acquiring the CD reissue of David Johansen’s first solo album (which I finally found at a not-too-ridiculous price, after searching for more than a year), not to mention my previously sort-of-mentioned involuntary and frequent plunges into my past courtesy of the Speedies’ song that’s being used in an HP commercial. I’m starting to wonder if this is all one of those Freaky Friday things where I’ve woken up and turned back into a teenager (in spirit, that is; alas, not in body. If I could wake up and fit into my old 26″ waist Trash and Vaudeville black stovepipe jeans, I’d be happy to accept any accompanying weirdness).

Of course, in some sense, I’ve never totally stopped being a teenager. Not having kids makes it easier to feel that way, and remaining a music fanatic at an age when most people, even those who were huge music fans in their younger years, have long since settled into either indifference or just vague interest in music, also makes it easier to maintain that teen feeling. But these recent things refer back to a very specific part of my teeny years—let’s call it 1979, since that would be about the midpoint of the stuf f in question—and they’re aspects of that time that it never occurred to me to be nostalgic for.

I’m not making sense yet, am I? Okay, let me enumerate just a little:

1. Butterflies was a British TV series that started airing on PBS not long after it first aired in the UK, which was 1978. I actually don’t quite remember what year it was when I started watching it, but I know I was still living at home, so it was pre-1981. (And then I watched it again, the whole series, years and years later when PBS re-ran it, but that would skew my whole point here, so let’s ignore it.)

It was a quirky series, the type of series that a lot of guys I know would have hated then, as teenagers, and would hate now, as ostensible grownups, though it wasn’t exactly a girly series. It was about a family, and especially the parent couple, and a little bit about adultery, and suburban life, I guess—none of which were things that had any relevance to me personally when I first watched it. (Well, okay, I had a family, but my two much older brothers were nothing at all like the late-teen sons on the show.) It starred Geoffrey Palmer, who any USian who’s ever watched a second of British TV would recognize (among many, many other things, he starred in the brilliant series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin), and Wendy Craig, who most USians probably wouldn’t recognize, which is their loss because she’s such a lovely actress. It was both very funny and absolutely heart-tearing. Ria, the Wendy Craig character, is a generally happy but vaguely restless and dissatisfied suburban wife and mother, and one day, she meets a charming and extremely wealthy man in the park who becomes utterly smitten with her. The show centers around the family’s daily life, with some very funny running jokes and some sensitively handled plots involving the teenage sons, but the temptation of an affair with Leonard, the rich guy, quietly underlies the whole air of the show. It takes over Ria’s inner life, even though her strong moral code (and her essential conventionality, I guess, though the moral stuff is more obvious, and admirable) means she never gives into the temptation of having an affair. (She comes very close at one point and gets cold feet, in one of the more moving episodes.)

The acting was superb, from Geoffrey Palmer’s likeable if slightly irascible overworked dentist husband to Bruce Montague’s ineffably sad and lonely Leonard, and the young men who played the sons were great too. But that doesn’t quite explain why the series affected me the way it did, and I’m not sure I can explain it even now. I will say, though, that even thinking about certain scenes from it (even now, at least 15 years since the last time I saw an episode of it) can make me cry, and on the other hand, remembering some of the running jokes (there were always issues with moving the family’s three or four cars around their small driveway, and the neighbors in their quiet suburban street were always shaking fists at them or staring at them in bewilderment) can still crack me up. Back when I used to write songs, I even wrote one around a line from the show: Leonard is once again trying to persuade Ria to have a tryst with him, and he comments, quite sardonically, that “everyone is doing it these days.” Ria’s response is adamant and startling and memorable: “I am not a product of ‘these days,’” she says. That affected me profoundly, don’t ask me why. (It still does, in fact; I’m having to fight back tears and will have to plead allergies if anyone walks by.)

2. So that was Butterflies, and I have to say I can’t wait for it to show up in the mail (which, knowing DeepDiscountDVD, should be sometime in late October…but hey, they ship for free, so who am I to complain?). (Season 2 isn’t out on DVD yet, but I’m going to preorder it.) The Speedies thing I’m going to have to get back to later, because it will be long and ruminative, providing my @#%& laptop keyboard doesn’t eat it again. So that leaves the first David Johansen record, which I haven’t listened to yet because I’m just a tiny bit afraid that it won’t sound as wonderful to me as it did in 1978. But I’m pretty sure it will. It’s one of those inescapably time-and-place records for me, and I suspect that when I hear it, I’ll be sitting in the armchair in the living room of the apartment I grew up in, gazing out at the beautiful mess of Broadway, maybe sipping an alcohol-and-Tab concoction that I put together after everyone went to bed, feeling the spring breeze coming in through the window. Maybe my first boyfriend, Richard—he who should forever be known as “that shithead”—will be sitting next to me, and my parents will be out of town and we’ll be staying up all night listening to records on my dad’s stereo. It’s one of those records.

One of my claims to…er, something (not fame) is that I saw the New York Dolls when I was a tiny child. Okay, I was 12, just about to turn 13. I put on makeup and glitter and platform shoes and got myself into Max’s Kansas City (”Are you 18?” the door guy asked. “Yes, I’m 18,” I replied in a world-weary tone. “Yeah, you’re 18,” he said, rolling his eyes. But he let me in anyway.) It wasn’t the first show I ever went to, but it was my first nightclub show, and it was a giant thrill. And growing up in NYC at the time, I was lucky enough to be hip enough to read Creem often enough to know and love the New York Dolls. By the time their various former members started playing in new formations, I was a seasoned CBGB and Max’s denizen, and I saw Johnny Thunders more times than I could count, but David Jo sort of disappeared for a while. And then he put out that first solo record. This is a few years before the Buster Poindexter thing, and eons before the Buster Poindexter thing went from being entertaining to being kind of a bad joke. No one knew quite what to expect from that first record (although he played some shows before it came out, and some of the songs were already becoming familiar, like “Funky But Chic”), and I don’t think anyone expected it to be so damn good. It rocked like crazy, baby, but it was also a breakup record (two breakups, really–the Dolls, plus David’s breakup with his longtime girlfriend Cyrinda Foxe), so it had heartbreak and passion and David’s big, surprising voice tearing you right up.

I sometimes think of it as the record that I lost my virginity to, though that’s factually incorrect; there was no music playing when I was actually losing my virginity, but the last record we listened to that night before the sex part was not the David Johansen record but Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks. But we spent a lot of time listening to music that night (and drinking Canadian Club, and feeling the June breeze coming in off Broadway, and so on), and the David Johansen record was one of our selections. That’s not the only reason it has such meaning for me—it was practically liturgy for me and all of my friends in those last two years of high school—but you have to admit it’s a pretty compelling contribution to my feelings about the record.

Nostalgia isn’t something I’m enormously prone to. Yeah, I love to tell stories about my Twin\Tone days and my following-the-Replacements-around-the-country days, partly because they’re sort of the only things that make me interesting (at least to some people), and partly because I want to tell them while I can still remember them (I’m quite serious about that), and partly just because they’re good stories and happy memories. But after spending a lot of my 20s and even early 30s wishing that it were any other time in my life, I gave up nostalgia somewhere along the line. So many things in my life have gotten steadily better as I’ve aged that nostalgia just doesn’t make that much sense. And maybe that’s why I’m taken aback by this sudden, random resurgence of weird bits of my past. I mean, here I am in 2005, and I really wasn’t particularly expecting to find myself in 1979. And it’s not a bad thing, but it sure as hell is weird.