Well, the Rapture didn’t happen, but this did: “’Evil’ drunk birds are falling from the sky in Darwin.” Yes.

Photo by RaeA, from Flickr.

In news you should not take personally, the man who wrote “You light up my life/You give me hope to carry on,” killed himself yesterday. It is actually a very sad and disturbing story. Joseph Brooks was awaiting trial on 82 charges of sexual misconduct, including rape. His son, Nicholas, is awaiting trial on charges that he murdered his girlfriend, Sylvie Cachay, in December.

by The Awl

We guess this is it. Goodbye forever! Here’s some of what we’re glad to be skipping.

• The 2012 presidential election

• Titanic 3D

• Having to stand outside a park to finish a cigarette

• Unavoidable and mostly identical essays on the meaning of Bob Dylan on the occasion of his 70th birthday

• Unavoidable and mostly identical essays on the meaning of Bob Dylan on the occasion of his demise (I mean, stay healthy, Bob, but it’s gonna happen some day)

• The rap-rock revival

• Whatever Sarah Palin does next

• Incredibly detailed analysis of Ashton Kutcher’s demographic appeal on “Two and a Half Men”

• Mayor Weiner

• Next week

• Joel McHale’s metamorphosis into one giant muscle

• The end of the right to organize

• Bridesmaids knock-offs

• The last print publication: Daily Beast Newsweek n+1 Cat Fancy

• Rich people living forever

• Color’s IPO

• Meat grown in a lab

• Senator Jack McCain

• Senator Patrick Shriver

• Senator Dakota Fanning

• Hurley dying on his new show that is not “Lost”

• The inevitable xoJane “It Happened To Me” post about giving a handjob to Justin Bieber

• Prime Minister Justin Bieber

• The 20th anniversary celebration for the release of Totally Krossed Out

• The last polar bear

• Whatever new social networking system that I have to be on because everyone else is that replaces Facebook or Twitter

• “I’ll take a decaf, please, I don’t want to be up all night”

• The cancer or cancers that are almost certainly metastasizing within me as we speak

• Not being able to stand, while outside a park finishing a cigarette

• Seeing those I love and who love me age and pass away; the death of the last person who remembers me as a child; the continual reinforcement of the knowledge that life is essentially meaningless and that I have wasted so much time worrying about things that are unimportant rather than celebrating the things that bring joy; owning a suit that is worn exclusively for funerals

• Greying pubes

Photo by Garrette.

That is one jacuzzi-enjoying bear!

“Citythings would become Venuetastic. Pivot completed.”
 — If you haven’t read the Wired story on startup incubator Y Combinator, it’s worth it! Makes me want to go to summer camp.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

7:43 p.m. Friday, December 30
Union Square W.F. — a natural grocery store

A: Oh. Oh my god I saw…I’m listening.

J: You see somebody you know?

A: A woman that lived next door to me.

J: On 110th?

A: My first year in New York, on East 16th.

J: Oh that old woman?

A: Yeah in…

J: Oh in the long blue coat. Yes and she has sweatpants rolled…

A: She’d…

J: almost to her knees.

A: offer me Pepsi since I’d carry her laundry cart. I’d put…

J: Still you had to decline the Pepsis I’m sure.

A: I didn’t want a Pepsi.

J: But she kept offering you the Pepsis?

A: Her sister developed dementia and accused my…

J: Does she live with a sister?

A: She did. The sister fell long…once stairs stood (to some extent) smeared with blood.

J: She’s she got up and walked away from it?

A: [Cough] head injury. No, I didn’t see her after that.

J: Well New York may have had another tombstone af…

A: What were we discussing?

J: We’d mentioned your daily rhythm and how, when you do what you want, living according to your own ambition or inclinations, you care very much what you hear — what’s being said and what people say back.

A: And you want to know where these rhythms…

J: Yeah. Yeah. To give others a sense, because it’s a thoughtful set of activities. It influenced my life tremendously. I mean people laugh: Amanda, for example, laughed when I said my breakfast lasts three hours. Then I went into a description of how I’d learned the three-hour breakfast from my best friend Andy.

A: Whose breakfast now takes seventy-five minutes.

J: Incredible.

A: Though I’ll include meditation, so you could say two hours and…

J: Every morning?

A: Yes. I wake from eight hours of sleep. I’ll want…

J: Do you ever set an alarm?

A: Always.

J: If you don’t set an alarm would you sleep close to nine?

A: I’d stress and wake earlier.

J: Because you’ll think you’ve overslept.

A: Sleeping nine hours makes me feel off.

J: So you get hard on yourself?

A: It seems quite gentle.

J: Waking in a panic, thinking you’ve overslept by an hour?

A: Oh. My means of gentleness is to to set the alarm and avoid that situation.

J: I see.

A: Then I stretch while cooking hard-boiled eggs. I’d…

J: You’ll cook hard-boiled eggs each…

A: Every other morning. I was giving the condensed version.

J: No give us the condensed version.

A: Ok. Ok. I’ve timed stretching to last fifteen minutes — for how long it takes to boil my eggs. After, and this lets me poo. Someplace in there I can poo.

J: Before you’ve eaten anything?

A: Yeah, if I stretch. After that I’ll meditate…

J: Your eggs cool as you meditate?

A: an hour and eat breakfast in…for a total of two hours fifteen.

J: You eat nothing before meditating? Yeah I hear John Stuart Mill, before eating breakfast, would work through Greek and and Latin exercises, and this is before he’d turned ten years old.

A: When you lived with me, I don’t know if you’ll remember this time, but when you and Stephen rented my room with me for…

J: Oh yes, that summer we split your room in Williamsburg.

A: Right it…

J: [Cough] a great summer. You’d leave James Schuyler or Joe Brainard on your desk, and I’d sit in boxers reading those books. Your roommates would kindly acknowledge my presence. They looked baffled when our stay exceeded two weeks yet didn’t confront us, which I found noble.

A: I have never felt so insomniatic. I’d try to concentrate before breakfast (before the full day started) think — wait here comes…

J: Morning freshness…

A: here comes my neighbor.

J: Yes maybe we want to…

A: No, we don’t.

J: say hi to her? No? Ok. But I waved…

A: You saw that snarl.

J: She snarled and looked down yeah; she…

A: Those are aliens on her shopping bags?

J: has aliens printed on her shopping bags. Her coat hangs wide open. Her scarf dangles messily almost to the floor. Do you think she grew up on East 16th?

A: I’ve read a passage in I Remember, sorry More I Remember, you know, the version before the edits, the final edits, in which Joe Brainard roomed with Ted Berrigan in an apartment in the East Village, and the woman above used to come squeeze them. Did you…

J: Squeeze them? No I never read this passage.

A: She and her brother, who had mental problems as well could barge…she’d force herself into the apartment.

J: Really?

A: Brainard says she was huge.

J: He was very thin.

A: But he ends the entry saying most cities would lock her up, which seems true of my neighbor also…

J: Yeah such a…

A: and that’s why we’re here.

J: And similarly: in other cities someone would tell us to get the hell out of this café with our recording instrument.

Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch are the authors of Ten Walks/Two Talks, which was chosen as a Best Book of 2010 by The Week, The Millions, Time Out Chicago and Bookslut. They recently completed Conversations over Stolen Food, a series of thirty dialogues recorded around New York City.

I listen to a lot of AM radio, which is “Amplitude Modulation,” and I don’t know what that means, but not so much in the morning, if you know what I mean, as far as listening. One of the best things about AM radio, besides how it blinks out when you go under a bridge if you are in your car and the static and how other radio stuff bleeds in and out of whatever channel you are on and how it sounds like it’s coming from The Past, is guys like Harold Camping, who has a show on a network called “Family Radio,” which is pretty much everywhere, even on FM (Frequency Modulation, and I don’t know what that means either) and the Internet. On his Open Forum show Mr. Camping takes calls from people with questions about The Bible (the Christian one like you can still find in hotel rooms), and you can always hear him flipping the pages when somebody calls (I think he rocks the “King James” because that’s what they have on the Web site) and the caller goes like: “Mr. Camping, in Romans 6.23, it says ‘For the wages of sin is death,’ but shouldn’t it be the wages of sin ARE death, grammatically?” And then Mr. Camping (and the callers always call him stuff like “Mr. Camping” or “Brother Camping” or “Mister Harold”) will answer with some sorta long-winded thing involving Units of Measurement and how a minute in the Bible really equals an hour, or how nobody can accurately interpret the Bible because all the translations are innacurate, but he’s always got An Answer, and no matter how dopey or pissed off the caller is (he takes Hater calls, which is another reason to enjoy his program) he always croaks out “Thank you for calling, and sharing,” when he’s done with a call.

Most of the time he sounds like he just got up after an all-night cigarette bender to take questions and he’s getting ready to bust out a classic phlegm-hack-before-hitting-that-half-smoked-butt-left-over-from-last-night-you’re-feeling-around-for-on-the-nightstand, but I don’t even know if the guy ever even smoked a single cigarette in his life, except when you hear his voice it’s like, “whoa, Marlboro? Pall Mall? Chesterfield? Merit?” Is it even against the Bible to smoke? I mean, was smoking even invented when Jesus was around? Mister Harold could totally be a two-pack-a-day man, and guess what, it doesn’t matter what happens to his Corporeal Form, because he says the shit that is gonna jump off on May 21 will take care of Everything, and everybody who doesn’t Believe is gonna get wiped out, and all the people who do Believe are gonna experience “The Rapture,” which I can never read or hear without having that Blondie song go off in my head with Fab Five Freddie and stuff, so I’m totally doomed with my Unbelieving, and look, this Camping guy has been talking about this shit for years, and he’s moved the dates around a coupla times because of his “calculations” and whatever, and I fully expect him to have some sorta explanation about what happened when I tune in on Monday night on my way home from my job, and it’s all a lot of bullshit, hocus-pocus, etc., Religion is for Weak Minds that need a crutch, blah, blah, but still, hey, who knows, right? You don’t know.

I mean, you know, but this isn’t something you can prove either way until something Happens, right? If nothing happens you still don’t know, really, and that is how Religion works. Plus, Personally, I am a li’l bit scared, because I haven’t done any of the Requirements that will get me Raptured, you know? I have done Other stuff that puts me in the “Do Not Resuscitate” Category, immortal-soul-wise, so the best I could get would be an “Easter-Catholic” Rapturer if They would let me, just to see what’s gonna happen, if anything is gonna happen, which I don’t think it will, but still, you know? See how I keep ending up on both sides of this thing? This is my Problem. Didn’t Benjamin Franklin give money to all the Religions just in case? He wasn’t a dummy, he even got his face printed on the best money, the Hundred, and he never even was a President of The United States of America, you know? I wonder where he is now.

So Monday morning I am possibly gonna turn into some dust or suffer some sorta Punishment, and I gotta be OK with that, because I just can’t get it together enough to Believe Completely, you know? But then I think, fuck, if all of the people who Believe this shit are the only ones who are gonna be left, it’s gonna be totally boring wherever we all end up, I mean, think about all the Fun Things that wouldn’t be around if this whole thing pans out, and then if you somehow slide past the Inspection and find out it totally sucks and you want to leave?

Hey, what would be really cool would be if They got to go be all Perfect wherever that is, with their Rapture thing, and then left the rest of us here? I know, even less likely. All I’m saying is maybe there’s a Partial Credit? For example, I’m not paying my car insurance early because of this whole thing. It’s due on the 22nd, and I would normally pay it a coupla days ahead of time, but this time I’m gonna wait until after the 21st, just in case, you know? I mean, you don’t know.

Mr. Wrong can instruct you via many medias.

“Now my kids are feeling concerned that the world is going to end and they aren’t ready.”
 — There is nowhere to which the Times parenting blog won’t go.

At The Celebration For Reynolds Price At Duke

by Ben Cohen

One evening last spring, exactly one year ago tomorrow, I drove with a few friends through the quiet woods of North Carolina to eat dinner with the writer Reynolds Price. “Please don’t have any plans that will rush you away immediately after the last bite of food,” he warned beforehand in an email. We had just completed a class with Reynolds, what would turn out to be his final course, meeting Tuesdays and Thursdays around a rectangular table in a room overlooking a parking lot, to discuss The Gospels. This night felt no different than those classes, with Reynolds telling us stories about the friends he knew very well and the people he’d met only in passing.

“Have I ever told you my Bob Dylan story?” he said once at the beginning of class. (Could there be a better way to begin a class?) Reynolds had seen Dylan at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. In that same 75-minute session, he told us about his run-ins with Jimi Hendrix and Shaquille O’Neal before proceeding to read aloud from the Gospel of John. By then, his baritone wasn’t so booming — his voice had once been so musical that when he recited passages like, “Before Abraham was, I am,” it must have been nothing short of the sound of God — yet class still consisted mainly of him reading his translations as we hung on his every word. We dutifully scribbled his textual insights and then littered our notebook’s margins with everything else he said. Each conversation brought a new quip. Perhaps someone would ask him about Lady Gaga (“I like her name!”), or he might tell a story about seeing Bill Gates (“a piece of chalk with a suit on him”).

He could tweak both academia (“A great many modern scholars don’t agree with that, but a great many modern scholars are assholes”) and then roll his eyes, as always, at the mention of Twitter (“What a way to spend a life!”).

At the end of the dinner, when the sun was finally down, we took our ice cream and sat in the living room between walls that could have furnished museums. (Reynolds’ art-buying habit was so prodigious, a local gallery owner once tried to cut him off, like a bartender refusing to serve someone more drinks, because he had no room left in his house. That was in the 1980s.) Not long afterward, all of us recognized that it was time to leave. He turned to us, obliging, and offered one last snippet of what he dubbed grandfatherly wisdom. It was concise enough that I could commit it to memory even after two hours of red wine. “Never do something you don’t love for more than three years,” he said.

I was reminded of this night in January, when Reynolds died at the age of 77, and again yesterday, when about 300 people gathered in the Duke Chapel for a celebration in his honor. The event was called “A Long and Happy Life.”

That was the title of Price’s first novel, which he published in 1962. He was just seven years removed from his undergraduate days, when he’d forged such a legacy at Duke that the legend of him dashing through campus in a scarlet-lined black cape still persists. He left his alma mater only to spend three years in Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship — Duke’s president, an English professor himself, described this period yesterday as his “truancy” — before he returned on an appointment to teach freshmen. It was meant to last three years. He turned it into 52.

Reynolds did not want a funeral, and this commemorative service lasted only an hour, right around the time limit he’d stipulated: “In my lifelong dread of boring the world, I want nothing that lasts longer than 45 minutes.” The ceremony started with a 2001 recording of Reynolds reciting ten lines from Ben Jonson’s “To the Immortal Memory, and Friendship of that Noble Pair Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir Henry Morison.” His voice glided through the chapel before making way for five speeches, a poetry reading and a scene from his play “August Snow.” One of those speakers was the writer and producer Daniel Voll, the first of 30 men who Reynolds hired for assistance after a spinal tumor, discovered in 1984, left him paralyzed from the waist down. (He frequently referred to this job, a one-year stint, as the Reynolds Price Finishing School for Husbands.)

“Reynolds was gracious enough to let us think we had something in common with him,” Voll said. He paused. Then he acknowledged what that implied: we didn’t, and we couldn’t.

It was true, maybe especially so, for people who met him only last year. This was partly because he was the teacher anyone with a certain bent sought out before graduation — as Voll said, if you wanted to be a writer at Duke, someone would tap you on the shoulder and tell you to find Reynolds Price — and also because he indulged in the sort of culture that other serious novelists dismiss while hibernating in their garrets. I learned just yesterday, and it somehow wasn’t all that surprising, that Reynolds delighted in scouring eBay. The same man who snacked on pimento-cheese sandwiches (from Ava Gardner’s recipe!) with Harper Lee also owned an Eminem bobblehead. He danced with Lauren Bacall many years before he was driven in a specially designed minivan to see “Twilight.” Once, before a poetry reading, he asked someone to pose a specific three-part question to ward off that cruel silence between applause and the question-and-answer session. This friend agreed, memorized the question, and, when the time was right, repeated the query verbatim. Reynolds simply stared and informed him that this was the dumbest question he had ever heard. He aspired to be the most memorable American writer of his time, and he also loved Fast Times at Ridgemont High. How could such a person exist? Even his oldest friends in the front rows — the gray-haired folks who knew him in the 1930s, 1960s and 1980s, who spent more than just a few afternoons in his quiet home, who have read and re-read his published volumes of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, short stories, memoirs and translations — hailed him as a veritable icon, a type that won’t be around much longer, a legend in any right.

The ceremony concluded with a recording of James Taylor’s “Copperline,” lyrics by Reynolds Price, and before everyone could file out into the cloudless afternoon to gather in the library to nosh on miniature biscuits and deviled eggs, the song filled the chapel with such sweet thunder that it made me recall something Reynolds had said just about three years ago, when a similar group of luminaries gathered for a weekend event called “A Jubilee for Reynolds Price.” The first night coincided with a basketball game on campus — you know, of course, why I remember this — and not a five minute’s walk away, Reynolds was talking at an oak table with his friend Charlie Rose, who was in town to interview him for the occasion. He had just turned 75. It was 50th year teaching. “What a good time I’ve had,” he said. “You’ve never met someone who has enjoyed life as much as I have.”

Ben Cohen writes about sports at the Wall Street Journal.

Since time immemorial, man has been forced to carry bags. Even worse: In much of my office-going life, I’ve been forced to carry a laptop to work. This has created Man Problems for myself, in needing to have a piece of small luggage that is also sturdy enough to protect said laptop. I had a very chic and nearly perfect slender black Lacoste shoulder bag that fit the computer perfectly, even in its little padded case. And then one day on the L train (of course) I shifted my coffee and my iPhone in my hands and it slipped off my shoulder and dropped all of 2.5 feet and the computer landed on one corner and was never right in the head again. (It was a long year with poor head-injury computer.) And so then… I became a backpack person. The worst and most degraded kind of daily luggage person. Fortunately, most fellows aren’t required to carry a laptop every day, and even if they are, surely we can do this better?

The good news about bags is: there really aren’t many rules, unless you’re working somewhere super-swank, or there are a lot of really judgmental fashion people around. Your bag should be useful and fun and right for you! For serious! And you know I never say that.

So many choices!

No bag.

The best! This leaves your hands free to fight with your Big City’s many zombies, racists and various miscreants! But more importantly, it also feels good. Don’t you feel all nice in your slacks and your shoes, strolling down the avenues for the subway, all unencumbered? Just your keys, wallet, phone, other phone, BlackBerry and office pager and maybe a stick of gum? No, but for real: anything you can do to not be carrying anything more than a house key, a credit card and a cellphone makes life worth living all over again. I’m sure this goes for the ladies too, who are constantly carrying around enormous bags for no reason.

The Briefcase.

Oh, are you going to court to defend a multinational corporation? Awesome, bring your briefcase! Your soft-sided briefcase. (Maybe in a nice battered brown leather!) There is literally no hard-sided briefcase that needs to exist in this day and age — you tend to look like a weird 70s stooge, or overly irony addled. Unless you need to carry a gun. Or something crushable, like a bunch of origami.

Mmm, sure, the million-dollar Salvatore Ferragamo double-gusset briefcase. Or maybe you just like to feel like a guy carrying a briefcase! That’s fun too.

Satchel.

We don’t use the phrase “man-bag.” It reeks of shame.

Prada calls this a “messenger bag” but it’s really a satchel. Prada also calls this $830, which, LOL. And now you know why they’re having a $2-billion IPO.

The Tote.

Hey pretty lady, where you going with that nice Paul Smith tote bag? Oh! I’m sorry, sir. Heh.

Listen, I’m not trying to be too gender normative here. I like seeing the guys going out to Fire Island on the train with a million kicky tote bags! Effective, easy, often great. And they can even look like men’s stuff. And also… tote bags, they look great if — shallowest thing I’ve ever said coming up here — if they’re crammed with like, issues of the LRB and the NYRoB. Sorry, it’s true.

The Messenger Bag.

Do you live in San Francisco or Greenpoint? Awesome, toss one on, dude, and tear off on your fixie.

That being said, it’s nice to have casual luggage that you can also use to throw everything you own into it in case you need to flee the metro area due to nuclear disaster. (That bag is made by Futura Laboratories.)

The Envelope.

This is a thing? Kind of a New York-specific thing, I think. It’s a step up from a Fedex envelope and a step down from an attache case. It’s basically a leather envelope? Like, you take a carrying-case for a Mac Air and lug that around. I believe this is serious Jack Spade territory. Downside: takes a hand. Other downside: highly droppable. Upside: Intriguing!

The Duffle.

It’s odd, and yet there’s something kind of hot about a guy with a duffle bag. I guess it screams “I’m going to go play a sport later” or “I just got out of the Army and stole some guy’s name and identity.” Also you can technically take one to the office because you’ll score points (NO PUN INTENDED) because people will think you have an after-work pickup basketball game. And after all, nothing gets you advancement at work like being one of the boys.

That is also a Paul Smith bag!

If you must: the backpack.

Listen, it could be worse. You could actually still be in high school!

So, I hesitate to tell you this… but you know who not only makes the best coasters (true fact: lots of zebra) but also makes exceptional and inexpensive luggage? Beretta. Yes, sure, the folks who make the guns. I know. It’s odd. It may not feel right for you! But their products come and go seemingly at random, because really their focus is on bullets and stuff. So you never know what you’ll find at their store (718 Madison Avenue!), but from time to time, it’s amazing. They made the best backpack ever invented a few years ago. If you can get your hands on one, your life will change.

Sponsored posts are purely editorial content that we are pleased to have presented by a participating sponsor, advertisers do not produce the content. This series/post is brought to you by Gillette. Learn more about Gillette and its products at Gillette.com.

Photo from Flickr by David Wagner.