MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Today I will tell you the story of my bittersweet first experiences on MySpace.  Sometime last fall I got an email with the subject line “Secret MySpace Project,” from Sam Frank: former n+1 copyeditor and current editor of Triple Canopy.   Sam sent out a number of  photographs of “defaced faces” by the multimedia artist Jon Kessler.  The faces were exhibited in a Drawing Center show called: You Have 43 Friends.  Sam, who had copyedited the catalogue of Kessler’s The Palace at 4 A.M. (the text of which includes ”a fictionalized interview between Jon, a four-star general, and the general’s youngest son, a Bard curatorial student“), decided it would be cool if he could get 33 of his friends to make MySpace profiles for 33 of the defaced faces. 

You Have 43 Friends	dissidentguy15

By disposition I am naturally quite sympathetic to secret art projects, and I was particularly happy to be assigned my ”first-choice” defaced face, for whom I set up a profile under the name of dissidentguy15. 

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I am really happy and honored to report that Vampire Weekend and I are featured in a joint profile in today’s issue of Sabah (Morning): the Istanbul publication recently determined by a Nielsen survey to be Turkey’s “most recognized newspaper brand.” (The most recognized brands overall were Arçelik, manufacturer of “wardrobe-style refrigerators” and other appliances; and Ülker, manufacturer of Cola Turka, and also of something called Badem Kraker (Almond Crackers), which as a child I used to feed to the swans in Ankara’s Swan Park. The thing that made a big impression on me at the time is that the almond crackers didn’t actually contain any almonds at all—rather, they were shaped like almonds. This was my first introduction to metaphor versus metonymy.

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Despite my mixed feelings about music reviews, I encourage you all to read my piece on Vampire Weekend in today’s UK Guardian.

My first step in researching this piece was to enter “Vampire Weekend” on the Guardian search form, and see what had already been published. In this way, I learned that the Guardian had in previous months published several items on the subject in question, including, but not limited to: an audio interview with the members of Vampire Weekend; a print interview with the members of Vampire Weekend; a review of a Vampire Weekend concert at the Hoxton Bar & Grill; and a review of Vampire Weekend, the album by Vampire Weekend.

I was reminded of a certain P. G. Wodehouse story, in which Jeeves extricates Wooster’s friend from a romantic entanglement with an opera singer, by arranging for the opera singer to be the fourth consecutive performer of the song “Sonny Boy” at a “clean, bright entertainment” in the East End. The costermongers are so enraged that they throw potatoes at her, and she breaks off the engagement.

“Just whom are these guys trying to get me not to marry?” I found myself wondering.

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Truly New York is the city of constant drama.   I had been in this magical city for scarcely 12 hours (8 of which I had spent asleep), when my mother’s iPhone was stolen while she was on the elliptical trainer; then we somehow both ended up getting haircuts. 

So, this will not be a long post—but I did want to share with you a piece of wonderful news for Bach impersonators (brought to my attention by the promising young Germanist, Na’ama Rokem).  Finally, twenty-first-century computer modeling techniques have been put to the task of producing a historically accurate three-dimensional reconstruction of the head of Johann Sebastian Bach.  Not a moment too soon, gentlemen!

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Because of my abiding interest in our nation’s youth, I was really happy to meet Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and his girlfriend Sara last month in San Francisco.

Here is a picture where you can see how charming they looked, with their scarves, and also their entrance stickers from the Asian Art Museum. That is a Polo logo on Koenig’s sweater, BTW… but before you go starting the hateration machine on him I just want you to stop for a minute and ask yourself: WIKDI?

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