Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

Frank Sinatra Performing

No original content today.  But here’s a classic Esquire piece on Sinatra.

Also, before the poll, pour a glass of red and give each song a listen.

The Way You Look Tonight.

New York, New York

Fly Me to the Moon


In Defense of Polygamy, Kind Of., by K.B.


Polygamy CartoonAre you talking to anyone else right now?
How many others?
Are you in love with anyone else?

Her (2013)



Spike Jonze her 2013






Francoise Hollande Affair





robot porn cartoon





Untitled, by S.M.


Every couple of seconds there’s a metal “koklunk” sound that reaches the 3rd story window, attempting valiantly to keep the brisk fall morning at bay.  It’s probably some metal plank on the exit off the nearby highway, and its driving me nuts as my mind slowly unfogs from its restless sleep and I grudgingly become a being.  The words SLEEP and ESCAPISM are on my mind.

The room – askew the way youth doggedly loafs. Pillows where they shouldn’t be – on the slightly sticky floor, cups of alcohol on bookshelves, tables, laptops.  I lay on my back, trying to imagine the air I suck through my nostrils as a thick atmosphere, my cilia straining its mass like baleen.  The light shines directly on my closed eyelids.  Time slips out of relevance, a hop-scotch amidst a mad endless playground. “KOKLUNK.”   Fuckputain, I groan…I think I’m still in love.

“Hey sweetness, how you doing?” She doesn’t respond. “Mmm? that pretty face don’t match that nasty attitude.” A pause, a laugh. Looking left and right at the empty busstop, the N24. Is he worth it? “Listen, can I tell you something?  You’ve got a beautiful ass, and great tits too.” She raises an eyebrow and looks decidedly otherwhere.  “…and I’m sure in between,” he continues triumphantly “you’ve got a heart of gold!”  Confusion. What? Il assure pas flashes like a silverfish.

“Too much? Too much.  Ok. Ok.  Hi!  Yves. I was thinking this.  Don’t laugh, don’t, let me be honest with you.  If we were poor, and I were blind, and you had to lead me everywhere so we could beg, do you think at the end of each day we could be happy?”  Silence. Eyes finally meet.  Gaze held.  He says slowly, for emphasis “would we still have great, happy sex?” Bells chime, a church somewhere, the empty vastness of a Sunday morning in Paris, swooning gulls.

She turns to leave. He laughs, chases.  “Wait, wait! Here.” He gave her a note. It was warm, shiny, oily, exciting. He smiled, large, big, a queerness at the edge, as he in turn pivoted and sped off, literally at a jog, that left a vacuum.  It was brief, it was grossier, it was moins que rien, but he looked her in the eyes the whole time.  She is marked, later, in her own home.  She looks at the note in her hand, feels its weight.  Small decisions, infinite probabilities coalescing around the structures of meaning we assign, as abstract as math and real as penitentiary steel.  Don’t open the note, or else the universe will be disturbed.  Disturb! Disturb! I screamed, sprinting, sprinting, faster and faster, a blur, vertigo.

“KoKLONK” It’s a mountaintop.  It’s a backseat.  It’s a hand held in a hand.  We spend our entire lives as stories with the settings running like scripts at the background of our frothing neurons, and I think it’s safe to say we all search for someone who has been forged so that no matter the position, you find yourselves peering straight through, into the past and the future – alignment. Un soupir. Love.  Is it real? Of course, and it bears repeating.   Cultivate love.  Venerate the good.  Drink champagne. Eat the world.


The Subjectivity of Greatness: Federer v. Nadal













Rafa Forehand













An Assault on Vanity, by Philip S.


It starts in the shower.  You vigorously shampooed your curly brown hair.  You reach hands, perhaps individually, perhaps at the same time, to the showerhead.  Bubbles wash off.  Hands are normal.  Damp bones, elastic skin, fingers might have pruned a bit, but not like in a bath.  Shower hands.  Normal except.  Except.  That’s odd.  Except for five or ten healthy strands of curly brown plastered to the palm.  Slithering between fingers.  Clamped under a nail.  You lift hands back to the showerhead and watch for ten or fifteen seconds as each imposter snails off.  You catch the last and pull it tight.  It’s about six inches with, at one end, a bulb, its attachment point to the scalp, a keepsake from a previous residence.  Toweling off, you start wondering.  One or two is normal, but five or ten?  No, it can’t be.  No it isn’t. No. NO. NOOO!!!!!!!

This is a familiar narrative to many a male.  The older you are, the more likely you sympathize.  Approximately 50% of men experience significant hair-loss by 50.  And when it starts, it doesn’t stop.  After a month or so, the drain in your shower may have clogged.  Further investigation reveals a crusty mass of recently-unemployed curly brown banded together, voicing discontent the only way it knows how.

Androgenic alopecia, male pattern baldness, is a common condition shrouded in myth.  The most prevalent, the one I wanted to believe, is it’s inherited from the maternal grandfather.  Another assigns stress as the main agent.  Indeed, stress can expedite the process, but the role it plays is minor.  The real culprit is the one you can’t control.  95% of hair-loss results from genetics, and a person is 2.5-times more likely to experience it if his father was a victim.

Lurking in your blood, embedded in your cells, perpetuated by food and oxygen, the gene initiating hair-loss can activate any time post puberty.  Growing up, you fear the worst and hope for the best.  It’s a long way away though.  It won’t happen until at least 30.  It won’t happen, until it does.  Until you’re 19, in your Freshman dorm, on your knees, clawing to unclog the shower drain.

The first stage is willful ignorance.  At 16 or so, friends refer to your receding hairline.  But you don’t think much of it.  The body changes so drastically at that age that a hairline’s snaggletoothed corner doesn’t register.  You just hope to grow a few inches taller by the time college roles around.  Besides, your maternal grandfather died with a full head.  When a friend points to your slightly proceeded forehead, you size up the opponent and make a comment regarding either his weight, his performance in school, his mother, or the size of his genitalia.  Whichever lands the hardest.

Willful ignorance fades gradually into denial.  A few years pass and you’re 19, in the shower, hands covered in curly brown.  But your hair somehow looks the same as it always did.  Perhaps it’s normal.  It is normal.  Just one of those things nobody talks about.  Like how much money his parents make.  You know it can’t be normal, though, and, deep down, you’re wondering not about how it can still look the same but about how it’s possible you still have any hair at all.

Six months later, the fire alarm sounds.  You see smoke coming from under the bedroom door, and the knob is hot to touch.  You run to the window.  Phase three has officially begun.  Panic!  It happens suddenly, like how anyone who snaps an Achilles hears a pop.  You’re in a room with a gratuitous number of mirrors, or you see a photo of yourself from behind.  There, at the crown, is a lighter shade of curly brown.  It isn’t gone.  But the countdown has begun.  The prognosis is set.  Life is over in two years, three tops.



Why is there such paranoia attached to balding?  Why is it magnified if it happens earlier?  In a lot of ways minimal hair is practical.  It takes years before you need to buy more shampoo.  It dries in 30 seconds.  That five-minutes in the morning reserved for coiffing the perfect wave is instead spent eating breakfast.  Massaging hands through a shaved head renders the magnificent prickle.  Hair’s only functionality is to shield scalp from sun.  Beyond that, it’s just vanity.

Just understates vanity’s potency, though.  A person is so hyper-aware of physical appearance because of the premium attached to beauty.  The first thing a guy does when seeing a woman is determine whether he finds her attractive, and, if so, how she compares to others.  Women do the same, though usually more discreetly.  Critics omnipresent, everyone wants to impress.  Though tastes differ, certain characteristics are usually associated with a good-looking man.  Among them are height, jaw-line, and fitness.  Unfortunately, Marisa Tomei is an outlier.  Bald is not one of them.

When presented with the sparsely-populated inevitable, you panic because the end of being considered beautiful by conventional metrics is in sight.  It’s especially severe at a younger age for a few reasons.  Mainly, 18 through 30 is when beauty matters most.  Looking for a girlfriend or wife.  Interviewing for jobs and establishing a career.  At no other stage are higher stakes attached to first impressions.  It doesn’t matter, but it does.

Another reason it stings, especially at an early age, is it’s the first time you’re confronted with aging’s discontents.   A few days ago I was talking to a friend of mine who is now enjoying retirement’s commute between the golf course and afternoon nap.  He started balding in his thirties, and it didn’t faze him much.  What traumatized him, though, is getting glasses at 13.  He says it took years to accept.  I, of course, promptly told him I have 20/20 vision.

The social response to balding early is interesting.  It’s at the same time a sensitive subject and intrinsically humorous.  When I told friends about my essay topic, 4 of 5 stifled a laugh and then followed up with some iteration of, “You’re not that bald.”  But I was measuring their reactions more scrupulously than they my hairline.

Why the stifled laugh?  Precisely because it doesn’t matter, but it does.  It matters, but it doesn’t.  The stifled laugh translates to, “It doesn’t really matter, but thank God it hasn’t happened to me.”  It’s the exact reaction I had when my friend told me wearing glasses at 13 was traumatizing.  Luck, especially of the hereditary variety, is a source of pride.  One-in-six people still has perfect vision at 18.  I’m 25, and my eyes are better than those of most teenagers.  I’m awesome.

The fifth person, the one who didn’t stifle a laugh, was a member of Team Androgenic Alopecia.  He said I should write my first essay about a lighter topic.  Readers might find it heavy.  He’s noticed the reaction to balding early is either unsolicited consolation or poorly weighted ridicule.  It’s awkward to observe.  There’s no blue print for responding to potentially sensitive subjects.  It’s at the impetus of the afflicted to initiate banter or humor.  If you can laugh at yourself, a negative can become a positive.  Larry David made a career out of bald jokes.  With this essay I’m attempting something similar—leveraging insecurity as entertainment.

So what are your options?

The most extreme is a hair transplant.  But, even if he looks better, it’s hard, in my opinion, to respect a guy who takes the plunge.  Check out the epithets The Economist, one of the world’s most respected media outlets, uses in reference to former Italian President, Silvio Berlusconi.  The stigma attached to beautification surgery is it’s symptomatic of the overly superficial.  Especially for men.  Balding is a purely vain form of adversity, and the main challenge associated with it is to be able to accept vanity as, on the whole, not important, even though, oftentimes, it is.

The best option is to embrace it.  Jordan vs. LeBron is typically debated next to the subject-line “Greatest Basketball Player Ever”.  There’s a clear winner, though, when the subject is “Who Went Bald Better?”  Jordan shaved it and led with his smile and sparkling play.  LeBron has shifted his headband-placement for the last five seasons, using it to cover his hairline.  Sampras vs. Agassi is another comparison often made when talking about “Best 90s Tennis Player”.  Who went bald better?  Neither did it well, but, post-hairpiece, I’d argue Agassi did it better.

There are a few axioms for “pulling it off.”  One is that shaving it very low, or completely, is much better than the bushy horseshoe, or, worst of all, the horseshoe ponytail.  Another is that the taller and darker you are, the better you’re likely to look.

The most important axiom, though, is that people are less afraid of losing hair than of becoming “That Bald Guy.”  TBG is a loser, an uninteresting slob.  He’s out of shape, wears sweatpants, plays World of Warcraft, and probably watches a lot of porn.  Losing your hair is not something you can control, but becoming TBG is.  Overcoming vanity doesn’t mean eradicating it completely.  It means you do the things within reach.  You exercise regularly, dress well, develop sociable interests, and smile and laugh at happy hours.

Deterioration is an unfortunate symptom of growing older.  Everyone has his first painful encounter with aging, usually in his twenties.  Your metabolism might slow.  Hangovers last multiple days.  You enjoy talk radio.  Aging is scary, often traumatizing.  It doesn’t matter, except it does.  It matters, except it doesn’t.  Overcoming, accepting, and laughing about it is a form of maturation.  I remember when I thought I was safe.  When I thought hair-loss passed through the maternal grandfather.  I sectioned the bald into a category of “ugly except for the rare outlier, and, even though it’s not in a person’s control, karma must play a role”.  Perhaps I was right about karma.  Such callousness deserves reprimand.  If karma exists, this was a perfect place for it to manifest itself.  But I prefer not to think about karma.  I prefer to think people face challenges and become either better or worse based on how they respond.  Compared to other adversities, balding early is benign, afflicting neither health nor family.  It doesn’t matter, except it does.  It matters, except it doesn’t.

Opening of a blog, and a review of the 2008 film Man on Wire, by M. M.

I am supremely jealous of a 64-year-old French man named Philippe Petit. He did something incredible and became famous and well loved. But that’s not why I’m jealous. I’m jealous because he found one, single thing- a dream- and he poured his entire self into it, without reservation. He didn’t hedge his bets- he went all in, literally putting his life on the line. Image

In 1974, on the eve of his 25th birthday, Philippe Petit committed “the artistic crime of the century.” Carrying a 50-pound, 26-foot balancing pole, he walked from one of the newly completed World Trade Towers to the other. At 1,368 feet, he looked down to the ground, and he laughed. He jumped, he lay down, he spoke to a seagull, and he kneeled, saluting the clouds. He called it “the coup.”

Philippe is and was a human meteor; he is one of Kerouac’s infamous “mad ones.” Philippe is not a stuntman, nor a circus performer, nor simply an artist. He is a monomaniacal dreamer. And in August ‘74 he was dead-smack in the middle of his 20s. He made the choice to be great- to be large, bigger even than the tallest buildings in the world. As the star of their own play, people want to be significant. The questions we struggle with during this decade are broad and frightening to confront. “What do I want?” “Can I capture greatness?” “What am I willing to do, in order to grow?” Philippe’s answer is clear:


To hear him tell it, the story of Philippe’s obsession with the towers was almost comical in its simplicity. His decision, pursuit, and conquest were straightforward. At 17, he went to the dentist with a toothache. In a magazine, he saw an artist’s depiction of the future towers-to-be. With a pen, he drew a line at the top, from one to the other. Enthralled by this image, he skipped the appointment, ripped out the picture, hopped on his unicycle, and peddled home. Then he practiced and planned for six years. He walked in the air above Notre Dame. He went to New York and spied on the towers, pretending to interview workers on the top for a French magazine. He enlisted accomplices. Then he and a group of helpers broke in, climbed the stairs to the top, and at night they strung a cable across the chasm using a bow and arrow and some fishing line. At 7:15 AM on August 7th, he stepped off the steel beam and onto the wire, where he stayed for 45 minutes.

It seems there are three kinds of people. The first kind trudge along, avoiding choices, freedom, risk. They start digging their own graves at age 20. Thoreau called these “lives of quiet desperation.” The second kind of people takes a buckshot approach. Spraying shots everywhere, hoping to knock a few options out of the sky, they count on them leading someplace interesting. The third kind is Philippe.


Walking on a wire requires a meditative, absolute focus. You must exist solely in the moment, in the act of balancing. When he left the dentist’s office, Philippe knew that he had captured and now possessed his dream. He brought his focus to the coup. And he did it. He chose to do something that was impossible, and he did it.

By choosing to attempt something beyond the realm of imagination, Philippe became bigger than any person has a right to be. His passion and hope for the coup consumed those around him. He drew in others, who risked imprisonment for helping him. His joyful disregard of the rules, of the laws of people and the laws of physics had a magnetic effect on others. When they watched Philippe dancing in the air, they saw the most wild, willful, and exuberant parts of themselves. But when he saluted, the conquest was his alone.

He stepped off the rope and shed his friends. The others’ role in his life had been played, and they knew it. They had attached themselves to Philippe’s desire. Once his passion was realized, they each went home, owning a small piece of it. But they had no relationship to the new Philippe. They had been attached to his obsession, but not to his enduring self. Philippe was lucky, in a way. For a time, he had a single dream. He was undistracted and unencumbered, as those around him asked for nothing in return but to see him victorious. He became his own desire, and once it was fulfilled, he stepped back onto the roof a new man, baptized in the sky.

What happened afterwards? The film Man On Wire gives no hints as to the next 30 years of Philippe’s life. But he has done other walks—incredible feats of concentration and physical skill. Nor does he say why he tried the coup in the first place. He definitely wanted to break some rules. And he enjoyed the resulting fame, dropping his girlfriend and falling into the arms of the nearest woman for days on end. He says that, when he sees three oranges, he juggles. When he sees two towers, he walks. He did it just to do it. He turned into a dream of himself, into an idea, a consuming urge. Only ideas can be eternal. And, in his moment of consummation, so did he.

Image Philippe has lived every day of his life “on the edge of life.” When he saluted the clouds, he conquered the biggest thing mankind could offer. At the same time, he conquered the Earth and the sky. Was he mocking the universe? Or was he just playing like an exuberant child who finally got what he had wished for? Do I want to be like Philippe? I don’t want to be one of the people on the ground, looking up. I don’t want to be one of his friends, stringing the cable for him. But I do want to be that perfect achievement of an absolute, consuming desire. But first I need to find my dream. I’m currently looking for it in Eastern Morocco. Perhaps writing for this blog will help me to find it.