“What is it about human nature that we seldom feel grateful for such guidance?” asks a Times piece on those people who have decided to spend their leisure time nitpicking the expression modes of their fellow Twitter denizens, whether they’re as famous as Gen X crush object John Cusack (who apparently can’t spell!) or as everyday as a dude who’s just happy to be in slightly less financial ruin than Greece. Perhaps some of the uncharitable reaction comes from the internal contradictions of which these people are blissfully unaware — like, say, a self-proclaimed 140-character grammarian flinging around the phrase “grammar fail” when he wants to flag a wonky sentence? A true keeper of the English language might note that the rise of the word “fail” as a verb/noun/adjective/adverb/exclamation hybrid is one of the worst things that Internet culture has brought to the linguistic table. Which is saying kind of a lot, when you think about it.

Oh, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, it is much bigger than anyone thought it was! The exploded oil rig has, it turns out, three leaks, and is spewing out five times as much oil as previously thought, as much as 5000 barrels a day, though the Coast Guard (the socialist government protectorate) and the rig’s operator (fine American company British Petroleum) do not at all agree as to how much oil is beneath the hundred mile long oil slick. What lessons are we learning? Bipartisanship! Gulf coast Republicans and Democrats politicans are coming together; they have sent a letter to the president, asking him to change the administration’s pro-offshore drilling plans, and asking him to set a 125-mile oil rig off-shore boundary. They do not understand that the End of Days is upon us, and the planet is ours to husband and harvest!

Basic Elements of Life Discovered On Classic Atari Game Nemesis

Astronomers at NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii have discovered water, in the form of ice, and organic compounds on the surface of an asteroid called 24 Themis, which circles the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This supports the theory that an asteroid collision seeded the earth with the elements that developed into basic forms of life. “They have found something that a lot of people, including myself, have been chasing in the solar system for a long time, and that is water and organic material,” says Dale Cruikshank, a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. And here we’ve spent all this time in our little triangular spaceship, trying to blast these things out of the sky.

Here in New York, eventually everything becomes an exercise in nostalgia, no matter how abrasive and offensive it was in the first place. Today, let’s take the case of Liz Danzico, “user experience consultant,” and head of the Interaction Design Department at the School of Visual Arts. Danzico is quoted in an analysis of a recent survey showing that a majority of city cab riders dislike and immediately turn off those annoying TVs in the back of the car. She looks back to an earlier, more pleasant era of taxi greetings.

She fondly recalled those recorded voices of such New York City icons as Joe Torre, Jackie Mason, Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Elmo that greeted you when you got into your cab during the Giuliani era. These weren’t universally beloved either, but compared to the cacophony that confronts us now they seem quaint and reassuring.

Yeah, totally! Remember when Yo-Yo Ma kept reminding you not to leave your cello in the trunk? Those were the days. You young kids today have no idea what kind of Eden you missed out on.

Last evening, Marisa Meltzer and Doree Shafrir went to the 2010 PEN Literary Gala at the American Museum of Natural History and then made their way to Terminal 5 to see a performance by the rock group Hole.

Doree: I feel like last night was sort of a quintessential weird New York night. I had so much fun.

Marisa: Me too. I was sick all weekend And then I was like, “Oh, I’ll just go out and have one glass of wine. Maybe two!” And then I ended up having like six and getting home at 3 AM.

Doree: And next thing you know you’re at a party in the West Village you can’t talk about.

Doree: I was totally having a Lucky magazine day-to-night clothing crisis.

Marisa: We both had real sartorial challenges. Should we discuss our outfits?

Doree: You looked hot!

Marisa: Okay, so I had on a Maria Cornejo dress and tights (NOTE: not slutty ones, unfortunately) and old Mayle wedges.

Doree: No, I was wearing the slutty tights last night (NOTE: not Parisian, unfortunately).

Marisa: They were super-slutty.

Doree: Straight from the lingerie section at H&M.; They were also too big and kept bunching up. But no matter! I was also wearing this dress with zippers on it that I randomly purchased in Philly.

Marisa: I love that dress so much. Everyone loves that dress.

Doree: It’s a great dress. I wore it to your book party!

Marisa: I know, I was going to say that and then I didn’t want to be all, “Oh, my BOOK PARTY la la la la la.”

Doree: We were both somewhat alarmed to discover, upon arrival at the Museum of Natural History, that the PEN gala is, in fact, black tie. Which, I realized later, is something I knew deep in the back of my mind because I remember Leon Neyfakh freaking out that he didn’t have a suit when he had to cover it.

Marisa: Leon doesn’t have a suit?

Doree: He didn’t like 2 years ago.

Marisa: Leon, buy a suit!

Doree: I think he has one now.

Marisa: Relief.

Doree: Completely. So everyone was super fancy.

Marisa: Why didn’t we get the black tie memo?

Doree: They had some publicist issues.

Marisa: I mean, I think we looked cute but I could have used a “P.S., Many people will be wearing tuxedos and in fact one woman will have on a feather boa” e-mail.

Doree: “And one woman will be wearing sequin pants and a non-matching sequin top and a head wrap.”

Marisa: You got a little feisty with the publicist for a sec.

Doree: Well, it didn’t help that the press publicist had abandoned the front desk to go enjoy the party, and the other one wouldn’t let us in? I was annoyed, she kept saying she saw him downstairs?

Marisa: That woman! She was like 90 and wearing sequined pajamas and a turban.

Doree: And I was like, “Why don’t you use your little walkie talkie headpiece thingie and get him up here so we can go stalk Salman Rushdie?” I had to regulate.

Marisa: So attendees: There was that guy in the jaunty vest. Also the token woman in sari who is at every literary gala. (“Every”=”two we’ve gone to in a week,” obvs.)

Doree: Though Jhumpa Lahiri was not in a sari, I don’t think?

Marisa: Katie Roiphe was in black patent pumps. You know what? They were kind of a hot look for a gala.

Doree: Agreed.

Marisa: So high.

Doree: SO high.

Marisa: Then there was the woman who was literally wearing a wedding dress.

Doree: It was also sort of inappropriately low-backed.

Marisa: Like, “Sweetie, you can’t wear a white bias cut floor-length gown in public and not be taking marital vows.”

Doree: If I squinted I think I could have seen her butt crack.

Marisa: And I am all for recycling

Doree: No, I am fully with you

Doree: Wasn’t there a velvet tux situation?

Marisa: Oh, yes. Do you think those people all owned their tuxes?

Doree: I think if you’re wearing a velvet tux you probably own it.

Marisa: Do guys own tuxes? Or have I watched Metropolitan too many times?

Doree: I mean, can you rent a velvet tux? Seems unlikely.

Marisa: The hors d’oeuvres looked decent. Thessaly was eating some kind of pizzaish flatbread. Not that we ate any.

Doree: The bar was well stocked but the cocktail hour was too short.

Marisa: There was a scarcity, I strongly agree.

Doree: Though I guess most people were going to dinner.

Marisa: The cocktail hour should have been two hours.

Doree: Agreed. They had trouble moving everyone to dinner.

Marisa: I mean, there was serious people watching opportunity.

Doree: We should really be party planners.

Marisa: How did we feel about the space? I like that space, the Planetarium.

Doree: Well, yes.

Marisa: I like that it’s round.

Doree: Though, I didn’t really feel like I was at the Natural History Museum.

Marisa: Wait, is it round?

Doree: It was round-ish.

Marisa: Or was everybody standing in a circle?

Doree: There was a big circle in the middle. Who else was there?

Marisa: Salman! And a young lady. Also Susan Orlean, per her Twitter.

Doree: Yes. David Remnick.

Marisa: Margaret Atwood, supposedly.

Doree: Stephanie LaCava of Vogue.

Marisa: Patti Smith performed at dinner but was so not there for cocktails.

Doree: Oh, totally not there.

Marisa: Various people who noted that they read our LRB thing.

Doree: Oh yes. The woman who I thought looked like Traci Lords is apparently named Amelia Michelle-Black.

Marisa: Who is she?

Doree: She has suspiciously few Google results.

Marisa: I refuse to Google. I just want to imagine.

Doree: I think that’s a fake name.

Marisa: Good call.

Doree: Paul Auster and his hot wife Siri Hustvedt were there and Irina told the story of how he’s the only one who’s flat out turned her down for a quote.

Marisa: Oh right. I kind of respected him for that.

Doree: Patrick McMullan thinks that Sebastian “Younger” and Paul “Oster” were there.

Marisa: Somehow my first instinct is to defend the poor party photographers. But I have no idea why.

Doree: Haha, fair. There’s something about publishing galas that are always funny to me.

Marisa: And then, just like that, they were called to dinner and we were forced to leave.

Doree: So we had some time to kill, and being on the UWS we had no idea where to go.

Marisa: You used your Yelp app!

Doree: I did. And we found a bar called the Dead Poets Society.

Marisa: The Upper West Side is SO weird. Like, people live there.

Doree: Or the Dead Poet? What was it called?

Marisa: It was The Dead Poet. Because, remember, if you shared your birthday with a poet you drank for free?

Doree: Or just a regular old writer. Like, Harper Lee was on the list for April. So in fact it was sort of fitting that we went there after the PEN party.

Marisa: Full disclosure: We ate chicken tenders! And they were delicious!

Doree: Well, I will agree with you that they were fried.

Marisa: Also I think you said it best when you said it was the kind of bar where you could pick up a reg.

Doree: Oh yes, I did say that. The bar was filled with dudes.

Marisa: And people on weird first dates

Doree: The girl behind us was talking about how privileged she felt to have gone to the best schools in the country.

Marisa: She was totally onto my eavesdropping. I wasn’t being very subtle

Doree: Haha.

Marisa: Then, in kind of a When in Rome moment, we went and got Tasti-D-Lite, or whatever it was called. The generic version.

Doree: And wondered why there are always pay-as-you-go internet-access-computers at these establishments. Who uses them? Who is paying like $3 for 5 minutes of Internet at 79th and Amsterdam?

Marisa: Truly, a question for our times.

Doree: Truly.

Marisa: What flavor did you get? I got “brownies.”

Doree: I got a mix of brownies and french vanilla, with mini chocolate chips on top, in a waffle cone. It was an intense situation.

Marisa: So, then, Hole.

Doree: The crowd was not what I was expecting. Though to be fair… what WAS I expecting? Hundreds of people who looked like us, I guess.

Marisa: there were a lot of guys there. Also Debbie Harry. And Chloe Sevigny. And Adam Green.

Doree: And that group of girls standing next to us, one of whom was wearing a tiara.

Marisa: Left over from her bachelorette, obvs. Actually? I do own a tiara. But it’s from the 90s. I think I wore it to my 22nd birthday.

Marisa: I bought a Hole logo necklace. Because, as Kara said, I love merch. And then the band came on.

Doree: Courtney looked amazing.

Marisa: Her hair is looking very Bazaar 1997 all over again. The pageboy. Her outfit, as Emily noted, was very Stevie Nicks. Black with bell sleeves.

Doree: The second outfit I thought was even more Stevie. And her gesturing!

Marisa: I believe Emily said, “All she needs is a top hat and some doves.” So, the songs: Bits of Pretty on the Inside. A delight.

Doree: Totally. I had had “Jennifer’s Body” in my head all day, but she didn’t play it.

Marisa: But she played “Violet” and I was so entertained. I mean, that’s what you go for, right?

Doree: YES

Marisa: I wanted more between song banter, a la SXSW.

Doree: She played “Malibu” and also “Pacific Coast Highway,” which is from her new album.

Marisa: But not “Olympia,” sadly.

Doree: NOT “OLYMPIA!” WTF was that about?

Marisa: I guess I’m okay with that. I LIVED it. “Miss World.” “Doll Parts.”

Doree: Yeah, she did play some classics. Which I appreciated.

Marisa: But it was SO short.

Doree: SO short. Like, almost insultingly short.

Marisa: Like, the whole show including encore was 45 minutes, tops?

Doree: Yes. Barely.

Marisa: And I like things short.

Doree: I mean, the old lady in me appreciated that they started on time. But they didn’t need to end before 11.

Marisa: Exactly. It did leave us enough time to go to the Ace for a drink, which was nice.

Doree: That was nice. I enjoy the Ace. Jon met us there and we learned about his 3 levels of unbuttoning his shirt, which Elizabeth promptly Tweeted about.

Marisa: “Work, summer, and party.” Perhaps we should end on that note. I want that to be the theme of my life: work, summer, and party.

Doree: Right now the theme of my life is work, work, work and I am fucking tired.

Oh yay, our server is (mostly, sorta) back (on the mend at least), so now you can all go back to fighting about Arizona/racism and Rivers Cuomo/ladyism.

The Magic 8 Ball Movie Hollywood Has In Development Will Probably Not Be As Inventive As The Magic 8 Ball Movie You And Your Friends Dreamed Up In Third Grade

The Magic 8 Ball — the plastic fortune teller that used to liven up slumber parties with its suspended-in-liquid predictions of the future — will be the basis for a live-action film thanks to a freshly struck deal between Mattel, which manufactures the ball, and Paramount. Every time I try to think of a joke to pair with this piece of news, my brain says, “REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN.” Because what else can you say, really? Except “OK, I give up. You win, world”? [Pic via]

by Richard Beck

The Young @ Heart Chorus is that group of old people who sing rock songs. A couple years ago somebody made a documentary about them, but it’s not very good. Instead, see their new revue, “The End of the Road,” at St. Ann’s Warehouse. They are there through Saturday. It is the #1 recommended way to see these old people sing.

The theme of the set was “nightclub,” which didn’t have much of anything to do with the actual songs. Performers “entered” and “exited” through a big, pyramidal revolving door and sometimes a chorus member would walk through the door as though to leave only to revolve all the way back onstage. I have no idea whether this was a choreographed move, genuine confusion, or just old people having fun with the fact that younger people have a hard time telling whether they’re making a joke or being really senile (exploiting this uncertainty is absolutely the part of being old that I’m most looking forward to).

The other immediately charming thing about the show was that each member of the chorus seems to have been given complete independence w/r/t costume choice. A couple of guys who had originally taken the stage in normal suits re-emerged (for no reason) in bowling shirts somewhere in the show’s middle third. One woman carried a doll around for the whole show; the two were dressed exactly alike. Another highlight was Len Fontaine, the 90-year-old who took the verses on Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life.” He wore a gray zoot suit (some of you may know this as what “pimps” wear) over a shiny orange shirt, and the feather coming out of his fedora was probably a foot and a half long. The line “It’s now or never” probably had special resonance for Leon.

Now obviously there’s an element of gimmickry to the group’s appeal, but it’s not like that appeal isn’t grounded in cultural history. Rock has been explicitly biased against the aged from the very beginning, to the extent that it’s probably our current cultural ageism’s most important and influential ancestor. I’m not saying that every rock song feels this way. That would be like saying that every single member of the Tea Party is a racist. But just as white supremacist longing is undeniably a component of that identity, so does pop music loathe and fear people who age and decay. It can’t help it.

What I’m trying to get across is that there is something more than a gimmick going on when the singers in Young @ Heart perform songs that just wish they would die already. The group was founded in a Massachusetts nursing home in 1982, and its youngest member is currently 71. Last year, the chorus lost one of its most beloved members, Fred Knittle, who had been singing since 1992. Remember, when imagining the kind of emotional impact this would have, that these people don’t exactly have a lot crowding up their schedules. In interviews, some of them are pretty open about the chorus being pretty much all they have.

In the show’s second half, a woman named Dora shuffled up to center-front. She is 88, and she looks it. She performed “As Long as I Can See the Light” by Creedence, and the way the song had been arranged had her doing about the first half verse totally unaccompanied. As the piano and bass started to come in, bit by bit, it became uncomfortably clear that she didn’t have anything close to the right pitch. I’m pretty sure she knew that something was up, because she tried to adjust a few times, but the distance between where she was and where she needed to be was two or three whole steps.

This seemed like the show’s first outright disaster, but somewhere in the instrumental bridge Dora figured things out and recalibrated. She came into the second verse right on tune, and she obviously heard that she had come in on tune because suddenly she began to actually sing. At this point, it became pretty clear that she used to have a terrific voice, or at least a very well-trained one. She was doing the diaphragm-support stuff that anybody with memories of high-school chorus will know about, but she was also pulling off a smooth transition between her chest voice and her head voice, which is more than your basic-level vocal instruction.

The point being: she totally killed the rest of the song, nailed a couple of high notes and runs, and received a nice round of applause. Then she shuffled to the back of the stage, and sat down on a bench, obviously tired, with a big white shawl over her head. I don’t think she sang a word for the rest of the show, although it looked like she spent a lot of time locking eyes with the woman who sat back there with her to make sure she was OK. They seemed to be friends.

Is the Young @ Heart chorus inspiring? I think yes, although I may be especially un-inured to the kind of Midwestern sentimentalism and humor that run through a production like “End of the Road.” It’s obviously not inspiring, in and of itself, for old people to be doing wacky stuff. Old people do that all the time, as anyone with decent grandparents knows well. But this show is a more or less serious attempt to get comfortable with what it means to know that you’re going to die soon. I have a grandfather who, after smoking for his entire life, was recently diagnosed with emphysema, as of course you would when you smoke for your entire life. The consequences are the normal ones: very restricted physical activity, no flying without an oxygen tank, etc. And in less than a year I’ve watched anger and helpless frustration largely consume the person whose bi-annual visits made me nearly insane with happiness as a kid. On Saturday, I watched the Young @ Heart people stand in rows and sing, mid-tempo, “Theologians / They don’t know nothing / About my soul;” and it was pretty clear they knew exactly what they were singing about. I remember thinking that I wish my grandfather knew the same things.

Richard Beck is from Wallingford, Pennsylvania.

Maura: So…
Maura: I don’t really know a lot about the topic, but are there more pornographic films that are “parodies” of other films now than before? Or do we just know about them more because of the internet etc?
Choire: Over to you, Alex.
Maura: Well the “Curb your Enthusiasm” porno trailer just hit, is why I ask. And the other day I saw a (very faithful! and seemingly high-budget!) trailer for the “Big Lebowski” porno?
Alex: Oh man. What is it called?
Maura: “This Ain’t Curb Your Enthusiasm XXX”
Choire: Hustler’s “This Ain’t” line is pretty uninteresting to me? They just do one after the other and HONESTLY? Could they TRY A LITTLE?
Maura: They seem to be flooding the zone.
Alex: I think this is actually probably a good marketing strategy in an age where there’s so much free porn available? Like, they know it’ll go “viral.”
Maura: Right.
Alex: And that some people will buy just for the joke value, etc.
Choire: Yup.
Alex: But also, does that title indicate that the movie is NOT xxx?
Alex: Or that it’s not Curb Your Enthusiasm XXX?
Choire: Right? ENGLISH.
Choire: Also you know, most guys in straight porn are about as hot as Larry David.
Maura: They uglied up the Larry David guy.
Maura: They gave him yoda hair?
Alex: “Sorry, Jack Hammer. You are too attractive to convincingly portray Larry. We’re going to need to mess with you a little.”
Maura: The Lebowski one is a little interesting if only because of the porno within that particular film. Also, like I said, decent production values
Choire: Hustler really lost me at “Twilight of Virginity.”
Choire: Although they got me back at “John and Kate Fuck 8.”
Maura: Ew.
Alex: I wonder what they’re going to do for “Babies.”
Maura: Or “Buried.”
Alex: Probably “Ass Babies.”
Alex: Or they could just go with “This Ain’t Babies XXX.” Then it could be about anything!

Depending on where you are in town right now, you can probably hear the wind circling about the sky like a malevolent, grieving sorceress desperate to regain possession of her dead sibling’s shoes. (Or something, whatever, it is just windy as FUCK out there.) Still, if the possibility that you might be borne aloft and smashed into the side of a building weren’t terrifying enough, you should also know that we will soon be under FIRE WEATHER WATCH. Take it away, AccuWeather!

A FIRE WEATHER WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM THURSDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH THURSDAY EVENING.

GUSTY NORTHWEST WINDS OF UP TO 35 TO 40 MPH AND RELATIVE HUMDITIES FROM 20 TO 30 PERCENT ARE LIKELY ON THURSDAY…AND AS A RESULT A FIRE WEATHER WATCH HAS BEEN ISSUED.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS…

A FIRE WEATHER WATCH MEANS THAT CRITICAL FIRE WEATHER CONDITIONS ARE FORECAST TO OCCUR. LISTEN FOR LATER FORECASTS AND POSSIBLE RED FLAG WARNINGS.

What does it all mean? There will almost certainly be fire: a cleansing, purifying fire that will put paid to all your remaining hopes and dreams and is God’s final judgment on the plethora of sins, both small and large, that you commit every day as you make your way through this city, from something as simple as letting the elevator door close even though you see someone approaching to something as irredeemably evil as working for Goldman Sachs. God has had enough. Let the burning begin. There will be no mercy, only justice. And wind. Always, always wind.