Bootsy Collins Deserves Better

The other night I saw something that initially thrilled, and then horrified me: I saw Bootsy Collins (Thrilled: Bootsy Collins is on TV!) in an Old Navy commercial (Horrified: Bootsy Collins is in an Old Navy commercial?!?)

The first reaction was genuine and from the heart, because I love Bootsy Collins. I love him so much I named my dog after him. I love him so much I named the second dog after Bootsy's brother Catfish in case people didn't get it the first time. (Also, she looks like a cat and smells like a fish.) Bootsy (the man, not the dog) is a crucial player in my favorite band ever: the original JB's, James Brown's backing band circa 1969-71. Bootsy played bass, Catfish played guitar.

Bootsy's bass lines were amazing, lethally danceable. "Sex Machine" is Bootsy. So are "Super Bad," "Soul Power," "Give It Up Or Turn It Loose," "Hot Pants," and "Talking Loud and Saying Nothing." Irresistable stuff. In my many years of bartending I have never seen it fail to make people dance.

My second reaction was reflexive: it's always sad to see people you respect as artists being shoehorned into lame product -- commercials, however you feel about commerce, are nearly always unfunny second-rate product, particularly celebrity endorsements -- because they need the money. (It's a lot worse when they don't need the money. Is Jimmy Fallon really doing commercials for a credit card at the exact moment everyone is figuring out that he has the best late-night show around? Really? The moment it becomes clear that you can hold your very lucrative job for as long as you want it, you take the sketchiest kind of endorsement ever? The credit card company in question once sent me a card I didn't ask for, which I promptly cut up and tossed in the trash; soon after, I got a bill for the activation fee on the card, which I didn't ask for, never used, and hadn't activated. But we're getting off topic.)

As product, the Old Navy commercial is not great. The premise is that Old Navy's new "Incrediboots" are in fact made by Bootsy! Great job, ad execs! Take the afternoon off! Obviously, Bootsy Collins is in an Old Navy commercial because he needs Old Navy's money, and I have no problem with him taking it. The ad is not (particularly) embarrassing or unflattering to him. It's very brightly lit and Bootsy does his cartoon voice shtick and Incrediboots can be had for $15 and nobody gets hurt. Still, it seems beneath him -- this guy is one of the all-time greats. After he and Catfish left the JB's they made a single as The Houseguests -- one of the great funk instrumentals ever.

Then they joined George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic, where Bootsy played on most of America Eats Its Young and then began to develop the cartoon voice/star glasses/space bass persona that we all recognize now, eventually leading Bootsy's Rubber Band dressed like a Martian and playing a star-shaped bass drenched in effects. He's stayed in that mode ever since, and somewhere along the way his look has evolved from "visiting alien" to "Ringmaster at circus sponsored by Jeri-Curl." I don't have any beef with that persona, it's clearly working for him, and I do like the space-bass records he made in the 70s and I dig the voice and everything. Everything he's done since leaving James has been great. It just hasn't been as great as what he did in James' band. For proof, I offer a performance of the JBs at the peak of their powers: 0:00-0:27 I also can't say enough about Bobby Byrd, James' stage lieutenant and an amazing solo artist (backed by James' band) in his own right. "Try It Again," "I Know You Got Soul," "Hot Pants" -- great stuff. Here he keeps the "get on up" ball in the air, and fields James' queries about whether or not they all may hit it, or quit it, or perhaps count it off with aplomb. 0:52 You can't miss Bootsy: he's the one in the middle that looks like Big Bird. He must be 6'7" or something. I'm sure the dance steps were mandated by the Godfather but he certainly puts his own swivel in it. He is standing between two drummers because James had a very interesting way of making abrupt tempo changes as a dance number suddenly downshifted into a ballad: He would have one drummer play the dance number and then have the second come in on the ballad, and trade off from song to song like that. 1:05 More bands should have one hot lady dancer on a five-foot platform. What happened to showmanship? 1:23 Bootsy and Catfish are doing the steps together. I love it. Notice here how the line Bootsy is playing is very simple, and never changes. Most anybody who could play at all could play it. But can they play it for eleven minutes? One of the great, underrated skills in music is the ability to play the same thing the same way for a long time without getting bored. This is where the Collins brothers truly excel. 2:25 On to "Soul Power," with a busier bass line but the same tempo. This song, even more than "Sex Machine," is like a class in the power of repetition in dance music. The genius of Bootsy's playing in this era was that he provided an ideal foundation for five or six other instruments to add syncopated parts, while keeping the heads bobbing. He's the focus of the whole band, but you have to concentrate to even notice him. By all accounts, the problem with being in James Brown's band was James Brown. I can understand why the '69 JBs never reunited -- they don't much care for their old boss as a person. But James is dead now, and most of these guys are still alive: Bootsy, Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker, Jabo Starks, Clyde Stubblefield... Catfish is gone, and so is Bobby Byrd, but I can't think of any show I'd rather see ever than a JBs reunion. Take Old Navy's money, Bootsy. You deserve it. I heard the restaurant you opened in your hometown of Cincinnati -- which my sister-in-law described as being like the inside of a pinball machine -- went under, so I'm sure you need it.  I just wish you didn't.

Foreskin Is The New Black

One of the big decisions my wife and I faced when our son was born, coming up on five years ago (the days are like years, the years are like days!), was whether to have him circumcised. Circumcision seems to be falling out of favor these days, and though I never gave it a lot of thought before my wife was pregnant, I certainly made up for lost time in the second and third trimesters.

Fortunately, this decision was free of any outside pressure. Neither my wife nor I grew up with a religion that prescribes it (or, indeed, any religion at all -- thanks, Mom, Dad, Keith and Linda!), so no pressure there. Nor did either of our parents seem to have any strong feelings about it (or at least if they did, they kept it to themselves).

So it was our choice to make, and as with any big decision, I tried to look at both sides and weigh the pros and cons, which I will do my best discuss as un-graphically as I can.

Firstly, the idea of taking a small, defenseless baby and cutting off part of his body that does not, in any medical sense, need to be cut off was a hard idea for me to process. On a gut level, it doesn't feel a lot different to me from foot-binding or female circumcision (which needs a better name). The last thing I wanted to do to my newborn son was take a knife to any part of him. It feels like an unnecessary relic from religious rites that I never took part in. And, the Wikipedia page on the topic drives home in semi-graphic detail exactly what each technique entails, and it is more than a little disturbing.

Moreover, word on the street is that circumcised men have reduced sensitivity in the area in question. It's a little weird to look at bump in your wife's belly and imagine the future sex life of the person inside, but once I got over that hurdle I felt that, while I personally would probably have been grateful for some reduced sensitivity more times than I could ever hope to count, it's not really my place to make that choice for him. If he wants to reduce his sensitivity, there are plenty of ways (tequila, sedatives, topical anesthetics, Saran Wrap, Ace bandages) that he can do it on his own, when the time comes.

On the other hand, they say uncircumcised men are more susceptible to HIV. I certainly don't want to put the boy at greater risk of HIV, but I also can't help thinking that our greatest safeguard against the virus -- a condom -- doesn't work any less well on the uncircumcised, does it?

Since secular circumcision took hold in the U.S. around 1900 (thanks again, Wikipedia), most men in the States have been circumcised, and the common sentiment on this topic has been that "a boy should look like his father." The fear being that a young man will get a look at his Dad's piece, and see that it looks different from his own, and feel like his is weird, or deformed, or something.

The arguments for seemed much less compelling than the arguments against, and as you have probably guessed, we decided not to do it, and for the first four years of our son's life it was not a problem at all. But over the last year or so some practical issues have begun to surface that, if not enough to make me reconsider that decision, leave me at a bit of a loss.

It was a triumph, right around his fourth birthday, when he graduated from sitting on the toilet to standing when he goes number one. But pride quickly turned to horror when it turned out that about half the time, despite aiming straight into the bowl like a good boy, his pee was shooting out at weird angles, very often missing the bowl entirely, even at point-blank range. A couple of times he's had more than one stream coming out in different directions. Clearly, his wild foreskin is creating an obstruction, but no matter how much I remind him to pull it back when he has to pee, he just doesn't have the small motor skills to really pull it off (pun accidental). On one occasion, when he had a steady stream shooting out at 45 degrees, I reached in and tried to help him do it myself, but my fingers are too big and he's too small and he started giggling and saying it tickled and I felt like a member of the Penn State coaching staff and I quickly gave up and vowed not to touch him there again.

And what about keeping it clean? This isn't something I worry about too much for myself, as [SPOILER ALERT!] I am circumcised so everything's easily accessible and generally powder fresh. I don't really know, but I have to imagine there are some hygiene issues he's going to have to deal with, and I am not *ahem* equipped to instruct him. Including his, I don't think I've even seen more than 3 or 4 uncircumcised men in their full glory, and even then the total gaze time would add up to less than ten seconds over a lifetime.

Which raises another issue: I'm not the only one unfamiliar with the uncut male form. Most (American) women have very little experience with uncircumcised men (as do, to be fair, circumcised men -- at 4, my boy's orientation is unclear). I hate to think that we've hobbled his prospects, or that he will not enjoy the, uh, full spectrum of pleasure (trying not to be graphic) because his thing looks weird/unsanitary/icky. But circumcision seems to be going out of fashion (foreskin is the new black), so hopefully time is on his side.

As more and more children of the '70s and '80s (80 to 90% of whom are circumcised, according to Wikipedia) have kids and go with this whole not-circumcising trend that's sweeping the nation, more and more fathers are going to find themselves in this predicament.  Here's a million-dollar idea: an agency where uncircumcised men can be hired to teach young boys how to operate and care for their own private parts. We'll call it Bigger Brothers.

On second thought, maybe it's a thousand-dollar idea. It would probably lead to a lot of lawsuits. The insurance premiums would be through the roof. And the background checks on potential Bigger Brothers would have to be exhaustive to the point of being prohibitively expensive. Yeah, let's just not do it.

In the absence of a better solution, I have decided to solve most of these problems in one fell swoop by having my foreskin put back on. Which leaves only one question: is there actually a Father of the Year ceremony, or will my trophy be mailed to me?

When Zombies Attack (By Urinating)!

Random photo found on Google Image
Search. I do not know this person. 

Not long ago I heard through the grapevine that someone of my acquaintance had had an unfortunate accident: After a long night of drinking ales and spirits, he apparently rose suddenly from bed in the wee, wee hours, waking his lady friend, who just managed to stop him from urinating on the windowsill.

The gentleman in question was suitably embarrassed, but not exactly mortified, as accidents of this sort are something that just kind of comes with the territory when one enjoys adult beverages in less than perfect moderation (and by that I mean "poisonous excess").

Considering my own history of drinking myself incontinent, I am certainly no one to judge. I woke up half drunk and all wet more times than I care to remember (and probably a couple that I don't) by the time I was 30, starting with two incidents in high school, both on couches at other people's houses. In one case, I slunk out and hoped nobody would notice (it was a house party and the house was trashed so I thought it would be a while before anyone sat on the couch); in the other case, my host, a classmate we'll call "Klaus," said not to worry about it because he had done it a few times himself.

Klaus and I and most of our high-school graduating class spent the summer at the beach after graduation before heading off to college, and one night he managed to bring a young lady back to his room. As recent high-school graduates without adult supervision are wont to do, they had more than a few libations and he woke up in his bed soaked in his own pee, with the young lady still sleeping in blissful ignorance next to him. Clearly, a delicate situation. His solution, in my opinion, was the greatest tactical maneuver since Patton took Bastogne.

He got out of bed and went to the kitchen, filled a large pitcher with ice water, then came back to the bedroom and dumped the whole pitcher on his companion. When she woke up, disoriented and horrified, he said "Oh, baby, I'm so sorry! I went to get some water for us and I tripped on my way back to bed. Let's change these sheets and go back to sleep!" The poor girl never suspected a thing. I have long since lost track of Klaus, but I can only hope that he is leading troops in battle.

It was later that same summer that I learned that while a blood alcohol level of 0.05% is enough to impair one's driving, a blood alcohol level of (roughly) 1.5% will cause the drinker to re-animate from his drunken slumber, zombie-like, and unload on random objects with blank eyes and a total unawareness of what he (or she, let's be fair) is doing.

A few of my female friends were sharing an apartment at the beach, and after an evening's revelry everyone present had passed out, including a young man who'd bedded on the couch. One of the girls told a tale, with mounting horror, of this fellow coming into her room, opening his pants, and peeing into the makeshift shelving unit she'd made from milk crates, where she'd folded all her t-shirts.

If you are part of a social group that likes its refreshments with anywhere near the enthusiasm of the groups I have always seemed drawn to, ask around and I bet at least one person out of two has a good Zombie Pee story, and they don't all take place in high school. I know a man, an exemplary father, loving partner, well respected in his field, who was caught peeing into the oven by his better half. I know someone else who once walked up to a couch, while people were sitting on it, and hosed it down. I have heard tell of people peeing on other people's tents on big group camping trips. (For that matter, I have heard of people peeing in other people's tents on big group camping trips.)

One of my very most favorite zombie pee stories takes place at Burning Man, the big desert freakout where people camp and enjoy all sorts of merriment. Tents are pitched pretty close together at Burning Man, but in most cases one has to walk at least a couple of minutes to the nearest port-a-potty. Nobody wants their mid-morning, bladder-bursting pee to be that big of an ordeal after a full night of indulgence, so a lot of people get around it by keeping a pee bottle in their tent. Take your emergency slash in the bottle, dump out the bottle when you go to the port-a-potty after you get up for real (which at Burning Man is when your tent gets over 100 degrees inside -- about 9am) -- it seems gross in the real world, but Burning Man, I'm surely not the first to point out, is not the real world.

Anyway, a friend of mine -- an adult, registered voter with a mortgage -- woke in the pre-dawn hours, slightly disoriented from the night's excesses, and groped around his tent until he found his pee bottle. He unscrewed the cap and relieved himself, but almost immediately found the bottle overflowing onto his hand, onto his legs, onto his sleeping bag. It was then that he realized he wasn't holding his pee bottle at all -- he had unscrewed and was peeing into his flashlight.

I tell all these stories as prologue, and possibly as rationalization, of my own worst zombie pee incident, which took place in the early hours of New Year's Day, 2004. I had been part of throwing a really excellent, ambitious theme party for New Year's Eve, and in the course of events I personally consumed about ¾ of a bottle of tequila and probably a dozen beers.

I have no memory of the following incident, so I relate my wife's version of events as she told them to me afterward: She was awakened by the realization that I was up on all fours, peeing through my underwear. She kicked and shouted at me in hopes that I'd wake up: "What are you doing! Get out of bed! Go to the bathroom!" Apparently there was then a momentary flash of consciousness in my eyes, as I kneeled upright in the bed and put one foot on the floor, but then I resumed peeing into the bed from this half-standing/half-kneeling position. She did not regard this as an improvement, and the kicking and yelling continued.

Finally, she tells me, I seemed to become semi-lucid, stopped peeing, and stood up and walked into the bathroom, where I finished peeing in the toilet (here we can only assume, as there are no witnesses to this part of the story). When I returned, she says I paused, picked up a pair of pants off the floor, and gently laid them over her, like a blanket, then laid down in the puddle and went back to sleep for eight more hours. In a related story, I have not had a drink since New Year's Day 2004, and the drop in personal zombie pee-related incidents has been precipitous.

The lesson? I think it's obvious: if you find yourself at the end of a particularly consumptive night, take an aspirin, drink a glass of water, and go to sleep in the bathtub.

What's With The Hooker Shoes?

I was lucky enough to be invited to a really, really fancy party a couple of weeks ago. It was purely a case of nepotism: an old friend and coworker has found herself running an incredibly swank penthouse for a very old magazine that uses it for a lot of fabulous parties and photo shoots, and she invited my wife and me and a few of our other less fancy friends to see how the 1% lives.

My wife, sadly, was buried under her postgraduate curriculum, so I went stag. After I signed in, I was escorted to an elevator that took me up eight stories and opened directly into the penthouse, and then -- on a tip from the elevator operator -- climbed the stairs that wound around the all-glass elevator at the center of the penthouse up four stories, joining the three other glamour tourists in our party at the top floor balcony, with a 180-degree view of lower Manhattan. It was a fancy party indeed, the kind that gets mentioned in the society pages and photographed for the back of the glossy magazines, though I suspect that it was one of the less fancy parties to be held in this venue.

The view was amazing and the penthouse was breathtaking, and there were a lot of very attractive, well put-together, professional-looking people wearing obviously expensive clothes. Not to put too fine a point on it: It felt like a whole lot of Midtown people, which is a culture nearly alien to the East Village circles I tend to run in.  I felt like an anthropologist, observing the customs of a curious tribe of people who shop for clothes more often than presidential elections and use shampoo and hair product and moisturizer and makeup like Sephora stockholders. Metrosexuals, and the women who love them -- I observed them one and all with fascination. As I am but a man, I admit without shame that I tended to observe more of the ladies than the gentlemen.

One person in particular I found especially striking. She was on the short end of tall, had long, dark hair, and was wearing the hell out of an elegant little black dress. She had a little more makeup on than I would prefer, but that was par for the course in this crowd.

I had just about decided that she was the one. The one I'd love for the whole rest of this party. You know: the kind of love where you furtively enjoy someone's sex appeal from across the room when (and only when) they happen to be directly in your field of vision, without any effort or notion to approach, speak to, or otherwise engage them. These are the cheap thrills of the married and faithful.

She's projecting "professional" with those,
just not the kind she's going for

As a formality before making it official, I took her all in one more time from the top down: Beautiful, long, dark hair. Very pretty face, probably the beneficiary of some racial mixing (never hurts, always helps). Cute little dress on a lean, well-toned but still-curvy figure. Then I got to the hooker shoes.

Hooker shoes! Four-inch (plus?) heels in shiny black patent leather, with at least an inch of platform. Distractingly prominent shoes. At first I just felt like I was looking at one of those "One of these things doesn't belong" puzzles from Sesame Street. I was viscerally confused. This girl is gorgeous and obviously has a great job and makes money and probably lives in a sweet apartment filled with great-smelling pillows. So why is she wearing shoes that look like they should be pacing a sidewalk, pausing occasionally beside rented sportscars?  

Hooker shoes! When did hooker shoes become what attractive, well put-together, professional-looking women wear with their obviously expensive clothes? As Herman Cain might say, I don't have the facts to back this up, but there's a whiff of Kardashian on this, and if my knee-jerk suspicions are correct, that will be a much more destructive legacy than anything she's done lately to the institution of marriage.

Not only did these shoes sour my budding relationship with this person, they drew my attention to the shoes of everyone at this party. Have you ever shopped for a car, and decided on a make and model, but had trouble actually finding one suitable for purchase? Say you're looking for a Subaru Forester. Suddenly, every third car on the road seems to be a Subaru Forester.

Likewise, my wife has a fixation on badly-plucked eyebrows, and points them out whenever they appear on our TV. I never used to notice them, but now I see them everywhere and compulsively throw a soft elbow to point them out to my wife even when she isn't there.

I got an easy chair facing the door at
Starbuck's and was watching it so intently

that I didn't notice this eight-point buck

sitting right next to me. My hands were 

shaking as I took this photo.

Anyway, now that I'm noticing hooker shoes, I'm noticing that they're all over the place, on women who from the knees up seem like they really shouldn't be wearing hooker shoes. I realized that some pictures would be helpful for this piece, so I went to the Starbucks by my office -- on Hudson, by all the ad agencies, where there's no shortage of attractive, well put-together, professional-looking women in obviously expensive clothes -- and in a period of about five minutes took photos of about eight pairs of hooker shoes. (Sadly, most didn't come out. It's hard to take pictures of people's shoes on the sly.) Suffice to say, it was a target-rich environment.

There are a couple of things I would like to share with the hooker shoe community. Unfortunately, I highly doubt that even one person who reads this will need this advice, because I can't think of even one person I know, from close friends to bare acquaintances, who wears hooker shoes, and I don't think this blog is reaching a lot of people who don't know me personally.

The first is: I can't think of even one time in my life that I've heard a man say, "I had a great time with Stacey last night. She is charming and intelligent. She is an excellent dancer, the wine she chose was delightful, and she ordered for both of us in perfect Cantonese. I'd probably call her again, if her heels had been just a little higher." Or: "Genevieve seemed a little distant, and didn't laugh at any of my jokes. She reminded me of my mother in all the wrong ways, and her apartment smelled like burning hair. But, you know me: I can't resist a woman in five-inch heels!"

Second: Notice in the section where I describe the lifespan of my love affair with this nameless, otherwise gorgeous Midtown gal that her shoes are the absolute last thing I noticed. If they hadn't been such an instant turnoff, I probably wouldn't have noticed them at all.

When I did notice them, here's roughly what went through my head:

1. Shiny! Why so shiny?
2. Heels awfully high. On the job?
3. Ouch!

During my personal dark night of the soul -- the period when I was working five bartending shifts a week -- I decided I needed better shoes for being on my feet so much, and my wife suggested I get some clogs, because nurses and surgeons wear them. So I got them, and they were indeed very comfortable, but I soon found they were no good for bartending because the heels were probably two inches tall and I kept turning my ankle in them. And we're talking about heels three inches wide. I can't even imagine trying to get from the bedroom to the kitchen in 4 ½" tall, ¼" wide stilettos.

In the lobby at a big fancy ad agency.
The impact is diminished by the

distance, but trust me. 

To say nothing of how uncomfortable they must be! The suffering these ladies are putting themselves through is like some kind of modern-day version of foot-binding, only worse because it's voluntary. I guess in some circles, demonstrated tolerance for pain is a turn-on, but for the (spoiler alert, ladies!) strictly vanilla like myself, all I feel is sympathy (for the pain) and pity (for the mentality).

As bad as the hooker shoes are, they are at least a (marginal) improvement over the last trend to sweep Midtown's female feet: the pointy shoes. The less said about the pointy shoes, the better. Even more amazing than the fact that women seemed to think of the Wicked Witch of the East as a fashion role model was the fact that they also made pointy shoes for men, and men actually bought them. This is a chapter in American society more shameful than the McCarthy hearings, President Andrew Jackson's Indian policy, and the Macarena put together.

Hooker shoes aren't quite that bad. I'd put them more on the level of Iran-Contra and the "Garfield" movie: ominous signifiers of a dark cultural future.  

How Do You Top Doctor Octopus?

I love Halloween. Whatever weird compulsion it is to want to dress up in a costume, I had it in a big way for a long time. It was a beast that awakened once a year and took over my consciousness for weeks leading up to the big night. Looking back on my twenties, I have to begrudgingly admit that if I had put the same energy into following a career that I put into assembling my Halloween costumes I would be at least a few points of latitude North of writing a blog with a weekly circulation of about 45. (Thank you, Google analytics?)

I had a lot of good costumes over the years. As an adult (if someone in their 20s can really be called that) I always tended toward funny costumes as opposed to scary costumes. (I suppose one might say that there are two kinds of people.)  The one that really made me feel like I accomplished something was the Krusty the Klown kostume I made in 1998. I really committed to that one: I got the voice down pat, and the laugh, which was a little harder; I got green pants (size 42, to accommodate the fake potbelly I made duct-taping a throw pillow to a t-shirt), a short-sleeved pink shirt, and a blue bowtie from some thrift stores; I created the blue wig with male pattern baldness with a swatch of blue fur from a crafts store and a bald cap; and I got a big red pair of clown shoes, a clown nose, and some white gloves, from a Halloween store. I even smoked a pack of cigarettes that night. At the time, I had just started dating my wife, who started out amused by this effort but ended up creeped out, and begging me to take it all off. (I didn't want to do that until we got home, because I felt the only thing creepier than Krusty would have been Krusty with the wig off.)

It's been a few years since I did a Halloween costume. I think I knew it was really over for me when I repeated my Magnum, P.I. costume from a few years before for a costume party at a bar a couple of years ago. Sure, I won the costume contest at that party -- tight white short-shorts are always a hit --  but the shame of repeating a Halloween costume drowned out the triumph.

The beast lay dormant for a couple of years, which (coincidentally?) were my first few years as a parent. Halloween means nothing to a kid the first couple of years, so we sat out Henry's first one entirely and almost sat out the second until our good friends lent us one of their kids' old costumes, so we went with them on our neighborhood trick-or-treat route.

In our Brooklyn neighborhood, they do Halloween a little different than we used to do it in the suburbs: NYPD closes four streets for three blocks in the historic district, creating a 12-block snaking route of brownstone rowhouses, probably 30 per side per block.  With no cars on the street, the kids -- and you can't believe how many kids there are, they come from other neighborhoods to get in on this -- can zigzag all over the place and make out like bandits on the candy. Probably 3 out of 5 houses on the route are participating, and they're all right next to each other, so the kids theoretically should be able to score and score big, but there are so many kids out there that they're all in each other's way so they slow each other down, like a soccer game with 800 kids on the field. Except the kids are in Halloween costumes! It is even more fun than it sounds.

The tight white short-shorts are
under the jeans

We pushed Henry around in his stroller in his borrowed furry lion costume, and got him a bunch of candy that we ate ourselves and marveled at this scene. The houses on this route that participate in Halloween participate in Halloween. Everybody does up their stoops and gardens with big fake webs and scarecrows and strobelights; everybody handing out the candy is in costume, whole families hanging out outside with "Monster Mash" playing and everybody smiling. It's great.

For Henry's third Halloween we bought him a Triceratops costume, because when we asked him what he wanted to be for Halloween, he said "Ceratops." He was in his dinosaur phase, and "Triceratops" was at the time the only dinosaur he could dependably name.  Two years later he appears to have no memory of that costume. It was cute, and his mom modified it slightly to make it fit better. As for his participation level, he was a little overwhelmed by the scene and shy about going up to the people to get the candy. He was a few months shy of his third birthday, so this is understandable. Once again, we got him a bunch of candy, and once again, we ate most of it ourselves.  

But last year, the beast awakened. I asked Henry what he wanted to be for Halloween and, unlike last year, he actually knew what I was talking about, and he answered "Spider-Man." He was in the honeymoon part of his Spider-Man phase. I thought about that for a moment, and asked him what his best friend Zeke, with whom we planned to walk the route, was going as and Henry said, "Spider-Man." Zeke was also in his Spider-Man phase. (I would like to see some true scientific study on the Dinosaur phase (age 2-3) and the Spider-Man phase (age 3-4). What correlation do these phases have with the stages of brain development? Should parents try to prolong the Dinosaur phase if certain benchmarks aren't met? Is it safe to commence the Spider-Man phase before the child can speak in full sentences?)

Well, everybody knows you don't go to a Halloween party in the same costume as somebody else if you can help it, particularly not the person you're going with. It was not easy to explain this to Henry, but eventually he understood that he had to pick a different costume than Spider-Man. "What would be cool is if you could be one of the bad guys," I told him.

"Like the Vulture? Or the Green Goblin?"

As it happened, I had just finished tearing out and rebuilding the frame for my back door, as the old frame appeared to have been opened with a battering ram at some point before we bought the house. (As I mentioned, this story takes place in Brooklyn.) I solved the problem of how to insulate the gap between the wooden frame and the brick rough opening by stuffing in pipe insulation -- skinny, 6-foot-long foam tubes with a slit along one side, meant to be put around water and heat pipes. I had a lot left over, and had left it in the back yard, where Henry had played with it a little bit.

"How about Doctor Octopus?" I said, and before he even answered, I knew that he was going to be Doctor Octopus. The beast was up and out of its coffin, ready to feed. I Googled a few pictures of the villain, and Henry soon agreed, so I fashioned a set of arms with that pipe insulation, a belt made of cardboard, four wire hangers, and a roll of duct tape. I knew we had a pair of kiddie-sized 3d glasses that looked like old Wayfarers, so I figured all we needed was a green shirt and green pants and we were in business.

Here's a dimension that a lot of people miss on Halloween: you have to make concessions to the weather. The temperature on Halloween ranges from "not that cold for the first half hour" to "freezing," and there's no bigger bummer than having a great Halloween costume and having to put a coat on over it, especially if you're a kid. This, to me, is the primary problem with store-bought Halloween costumes: you freeze to death in them. So I'm thinking, I need warm green pants and a warm green shirt, preferably the exact same green. A quick trip to the kids' department at Old Navy scores fleece pants and matching sweatshirt, and my little Doctor Octopus is ready to wreak havoc on the city. We brought along his little fake-leather Fonzie jacket just in case, and even though it didn't match the all-green, comic-book Doctor Octopus I was going for, it evoked the trenchcoat the Alfred Molina wore in Spider-Man 2.

Without any coaching from me or his mom, Henry immediately embraced the role of villain, which even more than the costume itself was what made this such a memorable evening. As you could probably have guessed, in addition to Zeke, there were about 640 other Spider-Mans out trick-or-treating, and Henry attacked every one of them on sight, starting with Zeke. Actually, Henry attacked Zeke before and after attacking every other Spider-Man he saw. (Henry and Zeke's whole relationship is built on attacking each other.) The awesome quotient of a three-foot-tall Doc Ock taking on a horde of three-foot Spider-Mans, in front of a NYPD cruiser and a roadblock, no less, while bellowing in his best monster voice, "I'm Doctor Octopus!!" was lost on none of the parents. It was at this moment that all the getting puked on and the changing messy diapers and the lost sleep and my brutal treatment as a second-class parent by this kid in favor of his admittedly excellent mother melted away. This is what I was put here to do: to make this kid awesome Halloween costumes. Krusty the Klown and Magnum P.I. and Steve Martin and Reed Richards were all just warmups for fatherhood.

Which brings us to this year. I set the bar pretty high for myself with Doctor Octopus, and I have probably eight more Halloweens to go before Henry starts spending Halloween in search of beers and adventure. It's daunting.

Making matters worse, when I first asked Henry what he wants to be this year, he said "The Vulture." I wouldn't have any problem with re-enacting last year as a different Spider-Man villain, but The Vulture presents some challenges: he wears all green, which as we learned last year is no problem, but putting giant feathered wings on each of Henry's arms would be time-consuming, and making him bald doesn't seem feasible. Do they even make bald caps for 4-year-olds?

So I steered him away from The Vulture, but his next idea, a two-headed dragon, was even tougher. I toyed momentarily with the idea of papier-macheing a pair of heads with Henry's real face in its chest or something, but it seemed overwhelming. "How about a skull?"

Henry is really into skulls right now. Partly that's because people (read: his mom and I) keep buying him clothes with the skull-and-crossbones on them. (This is what happens when the metal generation starts reproducing.) He has a fleece hoodie with a skull-and-crossbones. He has four or five t-shirts with some version of it on them. And over the summer, on a canoe trip, I picked up a skull-and-crossbones flag at the gift shop to put below the orange safety flag on his trailer bike.

Riding him around on that trailer bike, I started to feel a little conscious of his bike helmet, which had crudely drawn dinosaurs in primary colors on it. It's very toddlerish, and Henry at this point can ride a bike without training wheels and is unfazed riding through traffic on Flatbush Avenue on the trailer bike. He needs a cooler helmet. So if I get him one, I can use this old one for something. A skull, perhaps?
Henry agreed to be a skull right away, and at first I promised to turn him into a skull-and-crossbones by putting a couple of crossed bones on his chest, just below his head. But then I started thinking about the weather, and realized he'll be cold if we send him out in just a black sweatshirt. I started thinking about his jackets and how they could work with a skull, and zeroed in on another fake-leather jacket he got a few months ago, that everyone keeps calling a motorcycle jacket.

A skull and a motorcycle jacket? Sounds like Ghost Rider!
Once I Googled a couple of Ghost Rider images, Henry was completely on board. I spent three nights turning his old bike helmet into a skull, and I have to say I am pretty excited about the results. Henry, for his part, has never been so excited about anything in his life. My only worry is whether he'll be able to see out of it well enough to ride his bike.

The Sad, Totally Preventable Death Of Jane's Addiction

Don't buy this record

Jane's Addiction has a new album out! Had you heard? I'm guessing you hadn't.

It wasn't all that long ago that a new Jane's Addiction album would have been a big, big deal, like cover-of-every-magazine, appearances-on-every-talk-show big. But in 2011, 21 years after their last decent product (1990's Ritual de lo Habitual) the world greeted this week's release of The Great Escape Artist with a universal halfhearted shrug.

It didn't have to be this way. Jane's Addiction was a great band -- more than that, an important band. All through the '90s, the last emotion I'd ever expect them to inspire was indifference. Anybody who was hip to Jane's Addiction when they were Jane's Addiction was into them like a religious cult -- and I held on as a devoted disciple for as long as I could.

To begin with, they had probably the best band name anyone's ever thought of (with the possible exception of Kathleen Turner Overdrive). Their first two studio albums -- 1988's Nothing's Shocking and 1990's Ritual de lo Habitual -- synthesized rock, metal, and poetry and created a totally new, almost alien sound when they were released. They sounded like Art and Religion and Sex all rolled into one awesome thing that sounded best LOUD.

Frontman Perry Farrell has always been the face of Jane's (while guitarist Dave Navarro, who has not worn a shirt in public in about 15 years, serves as the body), thanks to his piercing, nasal singing style, coupled with genuinely interesting lyrics. A few samples:

Buy this one instead

T.V.'s got those images, T.V.'s got them all, it's not shocking;
Showed me everybody naked and disfigured, nothing's shocking

or:

Wish I was ocean size
They cannot move you and no one tries
No one pulls you up from your hole
Like a tooth aching a jawbone

or:

One must eat the other who runs free before him,
Put them right into his mouth
While fantasizing the beauty of his movements.
A sensation not unlike slapping yourself in the face...


I'm not saying this stuff is all Beaudelaire, but in the context of the late '80s, the era of "Cherry Pie" and "You Give Love A Bad Name," it stood out for at least making you think. This band made you (or at least, made me) feel like I could rock out and be intelligent at the same time.

They burned bright, but they burned out fast, and broke up in 1991, almost immediately after becoming a national act with its college-radio/latenight MTV hit "Been Caught Stealing," because of irreconcilable personal differences between Farrell and bassist Eric Avery.

For a long time, Avery resisted the band's entreaties to reunite, so Jane's Addiction soldiered on through three reunions without him: the 1997 "Relapse" tour, with Flea on bass, and the 2001 "Jubilee" tour and the 2003 "Strays" tour, both with session bass players covering for Avery. It took the band until 2003 to release a follow-up to Ritual de lo Habitual, and with no songwriting contribution from Eric Avery, Strays fell completely flat, and ultimately served the same purpose as a new Rolling Stones album -- it provided the band with an excuse to hit the road and play their classics.

You don't have to listen to a lot of those classics to realize why Jane's Addiction hasn't been able to do anything cool since it lost its bass player. In fact, you don't have to listen to them at all, if you're like me and waged a sustained campaign in the early-to-mid '90s to permanently imprint them on your cortex through sheer repetition.

This one is also pretty great

Think about how the following songs start: "Summertime Rolls." "Mountain Song." "Three Days." "Up The Beach." "Ted, Just Admit It." "Been Caught Stealing." These are all great, great songs, some of the best rock of the late '80s and early '90s. (Nirvana and Nevermind get a lot of credit for slaying the demon of '80s lite-metal, but Jane's Addiction did quite a bit of damage in its short career.) And all of them begin the same way, with Avery's bass setting the tone and the rest of the band falling in behind him.

None of those parts are Beethoven, obviously; Avery isn't blowing any minds with them, and they don't require any particular virtuosity to play. But they were the obvious genesis of the songs, they had a vibe and a drive that inspired Farrell, guitarist Dave Navarro, and drummer Stephen Perkins, touched them somewhere that brought out each of their unique contributions that ended up being a whole called "Jane's Addiction." Put another way: Farrell, Navarro, and Perkins are a pretty flashy sportscar, but Avery was the key in the ignition. Without the key, that car's not going anywhere.

Supporting evidence of this theory can be found in Navarro's short tenure with the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the mid-'90s. When guitar prodigy John Frusciante became the second Chili Peppers guitarist to leave the band behind a heroin problem (a problem that, unlike his predecessor Hillel Slovak, he survived), the Chili Peppers apparently asked themselves if they knew any other junkie guitarists, and called Navarro. The record they made, 1995's One Hot Minute, had none of the funk the Chili Peppers were (at that time) famous for; it was almost all super-simple heavy rock tunes. Why? Because Frusciante's guitar parts (and Slovak's before him) had been the key in the Chili Peppers' ignition, as you can plainly hear all over the band's best album, Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Without any key in their ignition, the Chili Peppers with Navarro just reverted to what came easiest. (The album is so short on material that it includes "Pea," a song that features Flea, solo,  singing incredibly stupid lyrics and accompanying himself on unamplified bass.)

To some extent, anything with Perry Farrell's voice on it is going to sound like Jane's Addiction, because his voice (and, as importantly, the way he records it) is as distinctive an instrument as Coltrane's sax: the moment you hear it, there's no question who it is.

But when the "reunited" Jane's put out its first record in 13 years, nobody noticed, because it didn't sound like Jane's Addiction. Quick story: when the TV show Entourage premiered on HBO, I liked the show right away and watched all of its first two seasons. (I soon grew to hate the show, but I will resist that 2,500-word digression.) Even when I liked it, though, I muted the TV during the theme song, which sounded to me like the worst kind of Pro Tools-assembled, super-compressed, obviously edited, generic "rock." It was years later, after I stopped watching the show, that I learned that that theme song was called "Superhero," and it was written and performed by Jane's Addiction.

I got momentarily excited when Eric Avery finally rejoined the band and they started touring in 2008 and 2009, but I didn't have an opportunity to go see them play. Avery quit again in 2010, after trying to rally the band into creating some new material; they managed only new studio versions of their circa-'87 tunes "Whores" and "Chip Away." Avery apparently decided his good-faith effort to resurrect Jane's Addiction was futile when, on the day of the band's performance at Lollapalooza 2009 -- a symbolic gig, as the band had broken up immediately following the inaugural Lollapalooza tour in 1991 -- Farrell released a video for a song he'd recorded as a solo artist:

...Words fail to express how awful and creatively bankrupt this is. Suffice to say, the creative death of Perry Farrell is the other reason Jane's Addiction hasn't done anything cool in 20 years. After Avery's second departure, former Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan was brought out of cold storage for six months of sessions and shows, and then quit; then Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio was recruited to assist in the recording, and this week the result, The Great Escape Artist, was finally released. My initial reaction to this news was total indifference, but then I decided to give it a listen, so here are the real-time reactions of a hardcore classic Jane's fan to their new record, one song at a time: "Underground" A little bit of (surely synthesized) quivering strings starts things off promisingly, as Perry sings a couple of lines and then the band kicks in. It sounds like Jane's Addiction, although the amount of distinctly computer-generated sound effects is already a little distressing -- it seems meant to distract me from the fact that this song is built around a two-note riff, but it has the opposite effect. Navarro's solo comes exactly when it feels like it should, and sounds exactly like you'd expect it to sound, which is not really a plus for a band that built its name on zigging when you thought they'd zag. "End To The Lies" Where his non-rhyming lyrics used to conjure interesting ideas, now he just seems to be using them to present his side of his beef with Avery, kind of like John Lennon's petty and musically pathetic song-attacks on Paul McCartney in the '70s. "Curiosity Kills" We're only on the second song and everything already feels very formulaic: the quiet verse/loud chorus dynamic, Farrell's multitracked vocals. This song has a totally obvious G-C-D chord progression and no real riff to speak of (because the riffs always came from Avery). The session bassist they brought in plays steady 16ths, exactly on the chord changes -- a bass line Eric Avery wouldn't be caught dead signing off on. "Irresistible Force" This sounds like the Jane's version of a Red Hot Chili Peppers ballad. Perry even states "God is not dead," refuting the lyrical thrust of "Standing In The Shower... Thinking," which I thought of as filler on Nothing's Shocking but is head and shoulders better than anything on this record.

"I'll Hit You Back" Perry Farrell's publishing company is called I'll Hit You Back Music, so did he write this song after sitting on the title concept for the last 20+ years? Or has he been sitting on a written song that had yet to find a Jane's album weak enough to get itself onto? "Twisted Tales" This song makes almost no impression on me, other than to confuse me. What is it for? You can't rock out to it, it's not relaxing, you wouldn't want it on in the bedroom... what is it for? "Ultimate Reason" This one starts with a swell of some kind of synthey bit of atmosphere, just like the previous track did. It feels like Farrell is self-consciously trying to evoke the epic nature of classic Jane's, like "Three Days,"  but where old Jane's felt epic in the true sense of the word -- it took you on a journey -- this is just a bunch of parts stuck together.

"Splash A Little Water On It" seems to be about washing one's manhood in the sink after a late night out. Lyrically, not quite "Ted, Just Admit It..." territory here. Is this the first Navarro solo on this thing in since the first or second track, or are his solos just super forgettable? Maybe it was cold enough in the studio that he had to put on a shirt, and that sapped some of his powers. The solo goes nowhere, kind of peters out into a synth break that feels like a placeholder for a cooler part that never got added. "Broken People" seems to be trying to live in "Jane Says"/"Classic Girl" territory, but it sounds more like the Goo Goo Dolls. "Words Right Out Of My Mouth" Might be a decent  -- No, "decent" is too strong. How about "serviceable"? -- rocker if it didn't have these insipid lyrics about birds swooping down and taking his words. I listened to this album twice, and I do not plan on doing it a third time. Tellingly, it's being sold with a second disc's worth of material: live versions of Jane's classic songs, played by the current version of the band. Because even Perry Farrell knows that this record is terrible, so he hopes to leave you with the memory of the band in better times. Unfortunately, that was the only memory I had of the band until this crappy record came out.