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We ran out of the cat's standard, veterinarian-recommended diet food a few days ago. We probably should have been more responsible about picking up some more but . . . meh. Anyhow, we have been feeding her Science Diet which, by all indications, is a lot tastier than this other stuff. Ever since we made the switch the cat just sits by her bowl and meows every time we pass by, like a junky begging on a busy corner. My favorite thing about Science Diet is how they advertise that their formula is made with real science or something like that. I suppose this is to distinguish it from the multitude of cat foods on the market that are produced via some combination of alchemy and sorcerer's magic. (If there were such a cat food, that is the one I would surely be buying, if only for curiosity's sake). Science Diet also offers a money back guarantee which applies if you OR your cat are dissatisfied. If all the cats who eat this stuff become as addicted as ours, I can understand how they stand so firmly behind their product . But I do wonder what they're putting in there. Tags: cat food, cats
Current Location: Hoboken
Current Mood:  blah
Current Music: Trompe Le Monde, most punk rock album ever
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Hi loyal readers, I'm sorry my posts have been so few and far between lately. With Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, not to mention my own website to focus on in the name of publicity for the book (LESS THAN A MONTH NOW!) blogging has fallen somewhat by the wayside. This posting comes after about 2 weeks of attempting to troubleshoot some quirks on davidostow.com. iWeb, which seemed like a godsend when I first discovered it has taken to playing such pranks on me as rendering all hyperlinked text invisible and rendering all hyperlinked images non-functioning. I visited the Apple Store on 14th Street the other day (which feels more like a cult headquarters than a store. Does anyone else remember the days when you could recognize a store as a room with walls plastered with merchandise and a salesman who greeted customers with a hearty if not always sincere "Hi there, is there something I can I help you with?") The 14th Street Apple Store occupies 3 vast floors of a refurbished industrial building. To get from one floor to the next you walk up a wide circular acrylic staircase (one of Apple's cool shticks is that their retail environment and their product are both clear and minimal). The stair is a study in form saying 'to hell with function, we've got an image to uphold". With risers maybe 5" tall instead of the standard 7" and treads over a foot deep as opposed to say the 11" accepted norm, this funhouse-refugee of a circulation device promises a clunky and self-conscious ascent to the sanctified elevated abode of that modern oracle, the Genius Bar. Luckily, the landings are wide enough that if you need to stop and camp on your journey there is plenty of room for you and your Sherpa to sprawl out. Once you exit the staircase don't expect to find a room full of merchandise ripe for hours of browsing. Instead, walk (again self-consciously) through a "sales floor" containing nothing but minimal-modern wood tabletops with laptops set up presumably for demos or other interactive experiences. You'll never find out exactly what they're for because these computers are constantly occupied by iEnthusiasts who don't seem to have jobs. Anyhow, pass through this strange experiment in the retail-as-product to find a small swath of wall surface, maybe 40% of which has actual product on display. If you want to know more about any of this product, don't wait for an employee to register the look of confused helplessness on your face. Instead approach the duo of red tee shirted young men with the signature backstage pass-looking thingies dangling from their necks that mark them as employees of the Mac machine. They may resent your interrupting their conversation but once they realize that ignoring you isn't work they'll be forced to look down their noses at you just long enough to let you know that if you have a technical question you'd do best to solicit the advice of a similar bevy of men in blue tees ( I guess blue trumps red - at least we know where Steve Jobs falls in the debate over Picasso's early career.) The blue-shirted chaps will let you stammer for about half a minute before they tell you that the only way to know exactly what is wrong with your computer is to make an appointment at the 'Genius Bar.' Thanks a mil. I had never intended for this posting to turn into a diatribe on the Mac shopping experience. I guess it simply tapped into the designer / consumer within me that is leery of retail environments (or 'stores' for the lay person) that pretend to be anything but what they are. Yes, we live in a fast-paced world where the process of globalization as well as the rapid progress of technology promise to break boundaries that were for millennia taken for granted and to transform our environments (both real and virtual) in ways we can't predict. But business is still business, a store is still a store (be it online or existing in the concrete material world) and I know a marketing ploy when I see one. But, oh yeah, the real point of this email. davidostow.com is up but there are glitches and I am also having trouble uploading new files to replace the old as new news comes in and old news recedes into the past. So please bear with me as I work on these problems and check this here blog for news and other rants similar to the above. Until next time. . . dko Tags: apple, confusion and mystification, form / function discrepancy, isuck, iweb, marketing ploys, retail, technology, troubleshooting, website
Current Location: Hoboken
Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Went through all of Feist's Remainder while writing this -crap, gotta get ready!
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Actually, today is an easy one for me. Growing up I was aware of two dates: March 30th, my own birthday, the date on which I received a great amount of attention and affection, and April 29th, my sister's birthday, the date on which all attempts to call attention to myself floundered. I didn't know my parents' birthdays (now I do), nor - being Jewish - did I know Jesus' birthday (Although I was aware that if I was patient enough the holiday season would roll around at some point in the winter. To this day, however, I still can't remember if it was the 25th or the 26th when your savior was born on a snowy and blustery day in Roman Palestine). Anyhow, as the highly mushy and confidential ecard I sent Micol this morning attests to, a lot has changed. Somewhere along the line we both turned into grownups (for me it was about 1998, for Micol, maybe like mid-last year. Her birthday is now cause for celebration and celebrate I will in my own way, from the warmh and safety of my cubicle. More on MIcol later. She deserves more than I can put down here in the tiny window I have before it's time to make the donuts. HAPPY BIRTHDAY MIC! xo, d Tags: micol ostow, micol ostow's birthday
Current Location: Hoboken
Current Mood:  happy
Current Music: The Who Sells Out
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Since you've heard from me . . . . . . to quote the Wrens. And while I wasn't planning on writing a Wrens-related post it does come to mind that I saw them in their first New York performance in over two years at the Bowery Ballroom last weekend. It had been so long since I'd heard from them. They live by their words. I have always loved the Wrens (as musicians and as people) and I shudder to write anything negative about them. But I would be undermining the principles of good blogmanship (as I understand it) if I were to be anything less than honest in my assessment of their performance. It was well-played. It was loud. It was energetic. It was short. It was not as loud as their shows used to be nor anywhere near as energetic. It was the same show I had seen a handful of times before but with less gusto. I never saw the Wrens live pre-Meadowlands. But in my opinion the show that they crafted in the wake of Meadowlands' release was as close to small club (read: not arena) rock & roll perfection as I had ever seen. Songs were reinvented dynamically and sonically, dressed up for the stage in a way that rendered them just this side of recognizable as kin to their studio counterparts. The line between band and audience was blurred, not just on account of the energy that buzzed in both directions, but more literally as Kevin would freely throw the Mic out into the crowd and Jerry would hand out dozens of drumsticks and pull what sometimes seemed like a third of the crowd up on stage to tap out the staccato rhythm of "Boys You Won't", an army of makeshift drummers beating the stage, the walls, any surface available. This was energy, creativity and love. Last week's performance felt like the fast food equivalent of the wonderful experience described above, like the band got on stage and hit defrost. What saddens me is that - knowing what I know of the band - their response to a review like this would be a soft spoken, self-conscious acknowledgment that, yes, time has done its work on them and really what are a bunch of 40 year old guys doing trying to rock out anyway? Didn't we tell you five years ago how exhausted these boys are? The truth is that the Wrens have gotten a lot of mileage out of their myth, a myth that they earned and that has rendered them heroes in the eyes of fans. In the mid nineties fame knocked on their door but fame had a lot of baggage with it. The band saw this and made the torturous decision to pass this opportunity by. And in an ironic way this made them stronger. A decade later, still living and recording together, still holding down whatever jobs they could to make ends meet, they released 'Meadowlands', a musical crystallization of all they had been through, all the disappointment, all the hard work, the self-doubt, the regret and ultimately the coming-to-peace with all the decisions they had made. Still harking back to the influences that colored their previous albums, the Meadowlands offered something newer and more personal - something more authentically Wrens. The band took a big gamble and managed successfully to trade in Rock Stardom for a rare and legendary sort of Indie credibility. It is that display of unshakeable artistic integrity mixed with great musical talent that make the Wrens such a mythical phenomenon in the world of Indie Rock. And I commend them. It just seems lately that the band has forgotten that before there was the myth there was the music. At age 15 or so, I was given a copy of 'Secaucus' (the album prior to 'Meadowlands' that was supposed to be their 'breakthrough') by a friend. I didn't know anything about these guys but from the first minute of the album as the choreographed chaos of "Yellow Number Three" tumbled and glided gracefully into the confident rock beat of "Built In Girls" I was hooked. What I heard was the rawness of the Pixies combined with a Beatles-like approach to harmony combined with I don't know what but whatever it was it was like a drug. And this was coming out of Jersey of all places! Like me! Jersey! Didn't Indie Rock come from Seattle or California? This was the best Indie rock I had ever heard and it was coming from a few exits down the Turnpike. So when the Wrens get on stage and play a truncated and tired version of their once magnificent 'Meadowlands' set, slipping in jokes about being as old as the Eisenhower administration and taking advantage of every opportunity to demonstrate their bewilderment about how the kids do these days (Is iPhone a noun or a verb?) I feel they're losing the point. Yes, they have persevered, and yes it's hard to grow up, raise a family, and continue the rock thing and we fans love the Wrens for fighting the obstacles life has put in front of them and it gives us hope. But where is the music? Anyhow, older rock musicians abound today as 40 becomes the new 30 becomes the new 20 and people in urban areas across the country are figuring out ways to prolong a youth-like energy even while responding to the demands of work and family life. Bands like the Hold Steady captivate kids a generation or even more younger than them with powerful music that tells the story of their own experiences growing up. And then there are the real old timers. I once saw an old interview with a young Mick Jagger who didn't flinch for a moment when asked if he saw himself doing the same thing 50 years on. Arguably, music was different back then and the Stones had the type of commercial success that the Wrens passed up and that enabled them to trade in the workaday pursuit of steady income for a lifetime of full on rocking. But the point is that the real professionals don't really seem to be thinking about age. With all that out of my system I want to make it clear that I still love the Wrens. These days they may be playing too much into their own myth, but no one can take away the risks they took, no one can take away their talent and no one can deny that at the end of the day they are great guys with an affection for their fans the likes of which I've never witnessed. In a promo video I saw their PR guy saying "They brought danger back into music". That's just a silly sound bite. I'd say they did just the opposite. They brought the music down to us, they showed us that rock did not have to be about selling out, that it can wear the face of the really nice guy who sits a few cubicles down from you. They even mailed us free CDR's of 'Secaucus' when it was out of print. "Energy" yes. "Danger" no. To the Wrens: We love you for who you are and what you do. If you quit now we would be disappointed but we would understand that you have families and personal lives that need your focus and attention. But if you choose to keep going, give it your best. Be the Wrens again. Tags: aging, bowery ballroom, family, indie rock, live performance, new jersey, review of wrens show, rock music, the wrens
Current Location: Hoboken
Current Mood: awake
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I did mention something about lists. I'm compiling a list for myself of things we don't need more of. This is just a little exercise in snarkiness on my part but to say it's all phony irony and no sincerity would be a big stinking lie. The list is not a countdown, just a list in which items fall randomly as they come to me. Feel free to send me your own items and I'll start posting a contribution list next to my own, along with any commentary by you or by me regarding your entry (don't worry, nothing judgmental - this will be a safe and trusting circle of complainers). So the first few items on my list, the ones that got me thinking about the list project to begin with are: THINGS WE DON'T NEED MORE OF: 1 - Anthologies of short works by Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, A.M. Homes, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nick Hornby, Jonathan Ames, Jonathan Lethem etc. All of the above authors and many of their notable peers are all incredibly talented, but the rate at which they seem to band together to produce these collections is -at least to me- distressing. Flooding the walls and tables of B&N (B&N being one of the few retailers still bragging walls and tables) and immediately recognizable by the bold graphic quality of their covers (often featuring campy images of turn of the 20th century Americanna), these volumes' ubiquity would suggest that the only good literature these days is coming from the minds of 30-40ish Jewish and British hipsters who can't stop analyzing the absurdity of their own lives. If one good thing has come of this trend, its that it's firmly plugged the literary hole through which McCourt family memoirs spouted endlessly for about a decade. 2- Maureen Dowd Columns Tags: things we don't need more of
Current Location: Hoboken
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