43, 44.

do not forbid what you cannot prevent.
-gaston meyer, chief editor of l’équipe, in 1960, in reference to the olympic games' quixotic quest to ensure that all of its athletes were pure amateurs

i think this maxim should be applied to gay marriage, and 'the war on drugs.' unfortunately, as ds showed me, it can also be applied to gun control.

(btw, this quote reminds me of quote 14, which was, interestingly, also part of a double-header.)

perhaps fame does something to the head, and to the heart; makes one bigger and the other smaller.
-the newspaper the kingsburg recorder, in a testimony about hometown hero, 1960 gold-medal decathlete rafer johnson (lauding him for not falling victim to the described phenomenon)

i got both of these quotes from the book rome 1960, by david maraniss.

you take your car to work, ill take my board.

over the course of the trial, whenever they found themselves in the jury room - first during the little breaks peppered throughout the proceedings, then throughout whole days, while their deliberation was underway - jackson found himself drifting over to the windows, which cast three rectangular swaths of dusty july light onto the carpet and the conference tables. the room was on the 23rd floor of the federal court building at 500 pearl street, and the view from there made manhattan look like a carefully-detailed model. the island has two major clusters of skyscrapers - one downtown, emanating around wall street and terminating roughly on chambers street and the courts area, and the other in midtown, beginning more or less at 34th street and ending near 57th street. this building on pearl street was at the north end of the downtown cluster, with a veritable flatland of apartment and office buildings which all capped out at around 20 stories lying between it and the beginning of the midtown cluster.

somehow, he had never quite noticed this before, how the skyscrapers in new york came like everything else, in waves. now, looking out from this jury room, it was like he had come over the crest of the first wave, and was staring at the second wave, comprised of the empire state, metlife, citibank, and chrysler buildings, rising some two miles ahead in the distance.

each day that the trial bored on, it would seem to him that the midtown wave was getting closer and closer to his vantage point on peal street. it was as if manhattan was a pin art toy - like you might see on a coffee table, or some executive's desk - with the buildings serving as the pins, and the giant hand of god lurking beneath the pavement, dragging the waves of buildings ever forward. with the midtown wave came the trough behind it: the decidedly-residential upper east and west sides, crawling with bugaboo strollers and middle-aged jowls and facelifts.

then, one day after he came back from lunch, without warning, jackson realized that what he had been looking at that whole time, the thing that brought him the sinking sense of imminence he had been experiencing, was not the topography of the city but that of his own life. soon he would be thirty.

behind him in the jury room, people were sitting at the conference tables, talking about one of the counts. a young hispanic guy said that the defendant was doubtlessly guilty on this charge, but he was uneasy about rewarding the fbi's shoddy policework. an older woman from somewhere in the caribbean said that she didnt want to give the fbi approbation, but without a reasonable doubt, their hands were tied.

he barely heard any of it. because at that moment, he saw the two visions at once; the one he had been watching, and the one he was just now feeling were transposed on one another. he saw his entire life rising, like a giant swell in front of him, and it was rushing towards him at breakneck speed. an apartment building in the far distance was approaching ever nearer. soon it would be close enough that he could count its stories. he could see its individual windows, and then theyd be close enough that he could see past their glare, into the apartments. soon hed be able to see inside the one with the master bedroom and the sub-zero refridgerator and the tv and the coffee table and the nursery and the bassinet and the two full baths, it would be right on top of him. and then it would get infinitesimally close and then at the last possible moment it would snap and suddenly it would all come crashing down on top of him, and when he finally swam up and reached the surface and the light, it would all already be behind him and hed be looking even further uptown, into harlem, whose heyday was far in the past and where things were already beginning to rot.

jury duty.

the best part - pretty much the only good part - was seeing this framed portrait on the wall of the u.s. marshal's room in which i had to hand in my cell phone.

i also love that i immediately recognized it as, specifically, his wikipedia pic.

btw, i dig these clowns who are against his health plan, but have no alternative. it's like, yeah, let's just keep being the only industrialized nation without universal coverage. cuz that's classy. why make any sacrifices to change those bragging rights?

forty years ago today.

from a.o. scott's - as usual, nearly perfectly written - pop culture-infused take on the moon landing in today's paper:

(n. mailer was disappointed that) the conquest of space (had been) planned and conducted by scientists, bureaucrats and other practical-minded, down-to-earth squares.

But of course, “we” didn’t walk on the Moon. “We” were, like Rabbit and Aquarius, sitting at home, scribbling in our notebooks or, most likely, watching television while something happened to us that we are still trying to figure out.

scott's article, as i said was, as usual, flawless (he might be the best writer at the times.). and it aptly conveys a lot of my own sentiment as to the dichotomous nature of people's experiences of the moon landing. (no, i wasnt alive then.)

but, to me, it's important to remember that the moon landing wasnt about our individual, ephemeral experience of life. rather, it was the stuff of the collective consciousness (and unconscious), of the composite experience of all individuals, since the nascient humanesque primates, who first looked up at the moon and wondered what the eff it was and no doubt didnt even consider it could be a place as opposed to a light fixture, to the astronomical-age members of antiquity who understood it was a body, impossibly far away, to the people, like my parents, who were there to witness the event of 'our' finally getting to that body, to our children's children, who, presumably, will experience this intimacy with mars and other planets, to their progeny, who will touch the rest of the galaxy, and so on and so on.

no, it goes back even further than that. it's the experience of the first protist, the first algae, the first iterations of life whatsoever, born in the depths and darkness of the ocean, that began that slow crawl to the heavens long before anyone who could come up with the word 'heavens' even drew breath.

that is how i view the moon landing. not the triumph, but the first in a series of paradigmatic triumphs, which will continue ad infinitum, that show physically, forget metaphorically, that truly, anything is possible.

in short, i know that man can walk on the moon. but, chronologically if not numerically, most men before me surely thought that idea pure fantasy.

there is no fantasy. there is only patience.

(500) days of summer.

saw it last night with rh. ultimately, we like art that we feel empathizes with us. that having been said, this was some great effing art. minka kelly was truly the cherry on top.

best movie ive seen in a long time.

moma vocab.

i mean...

really?

seriously.

*i dont nec agree with the implications of these terms, but i like them.

last night.

i was at a party at j.go's, and towards the end, after the numbers had really dwindled, i was all set to leave according to the no goodbye rule (below), for what i thought was one of the first times, and before i even did, jr and ac said, 'cb, youre still here? amazing. you usually have snuck out of a party by now.'

42.

I think it’s hard to be great without the ability to concentrate. The more distractions we’ve built into our culture, the harder it is to develop serious thinkers and planners. And over the past 50 years, our span of attention has collapsed to about that of a hyperactive gnat.
-gail collins