Bet you guys didn’t know I was in The Darjeeling Limited. As is Owen Wilson.Not. Actually, my famous actor cousin is in it. And Luke Wilson. But this David Perilli guy is fucking braindead. Check this out:http://www.cambridge-restaurants.co.uk/ezine.cfm?ezineid=1048

I am in Palm Beach International Airport waiting for my flight back to NYC the day after Thanksgiving. After four nights and three straight days of cooking, drinking wine, sleeping, and not much else, I am ready to head home and get back to my life again. This airport is pretty bland, my friends, bland as it gets. It seemed kinda dead here for a while, but now I hear kids screaming all around me and there are people everywhere. And this is an off day for travel, in the holiday scheme of things, no? I’m thinking that most are at home pondering their gorged bellies, eating leftovers, watching games, etc. Personally I feel like going to the gym, and becoming a vegetarian and a teetotaler for a while. They claim there is wireless here, and it appears so from the four bars (full signal) showing on my MacBook, but I’m gettin’ nothing. People around me have laptops out, too, and they seem to be doing alright. What’s up with that? I should have unplugged, I’ve been thinking since I’ve been down here. The fact that I can’t live without my computer and the Web for a few days is kind of sad. And yet, paradoxically, here I am writing a blog post, effectively diminishing even further the separation between private life and what is shared online for all to see. Is all of this exposing ourselves a celebration of our uniqueness and our ability to showcase it, or are we as people becoming increasingly unspecial, diluted, diffuse? I wonder. Often.

It occurs to me that if I spent more time in airports I would blog a lot more. Hmm, what else? Funny how I’m blogging about my several days of doing absolutely nothing in Florida, but when there’s actually stuff going on at home I’m too busy to write about it. Guess that makes sense, though. So, what else? Crazy injuries this week. I burned my right palm in a moment of total stupidity when I barehandedly picked up a grill basket I had just pulled from the grill only moments before. My fish came out killer, though, so it was worth it, and what hurt like hell that whole night is actually healing pretty quickly now. Then, this afternoon one of the wheels on my suitcase thingy was stuck on something in my mom’s trunk, and in prying it loose I smacked my knuckles on something and was bleeding profusely the whole ride to the airport. I am still bleeding, kind of. How fucking lame is that? I’ve never been the most graceful, it’s true. I am no gazelle. It’s a blessing that I am small.

As you would expect, lots of older folks here in ol’ PBIA. When they walk by they eye my shiny silver MacBook like it’s an artifact from distant space. There are so many fucking children here right now by the gates, it’s crazy. And many are loud. I like kids and all, but I’m ready to board and put the earbuds in and watch crap TV and maybe another in-flight movie. Been here too long, got here too early. Moms can be neurotic about airport timing and stuff like that. Anyway, I am beat, so I’ll quit now. We should be boarding soon.

I am writing from a place called Wellington, FL, where my mom lives. I am down here for Thanksgiving week, and the first Thanksgiving without my grandparents. It is surreal and weird, but I suppose not as hard as I expected. Surreal because it’s like eighty degrees here, and green, and sunny, unlike the New York holiday dreariness I am used to. Surreal because my grandparents’ place in NJ is no longer ours, and they are no longer alive. I don’t remember the last time it was just me and my mom, honestly. But this has been nice, too.

I have done next to nothing while I’ve been here, and I think I have needed to do next to nothing (or maybe just nothing itself?), so it all works out. I have been cooking up a storm, which I love to do when I actually gain access to a real kitchen with, like, counter space and stuff. And my mom has a grill on her patio here, which is a very exciting thing. So I’ve just been spreading myself out, laying back and enjoying the mellowness, before I have to compact myself back into my wee NYC apartment and return to life there.

TDoJB has been on a bit of a break, at least from playing, which has been good and also quite weird for me. It’s a good thing to take a step back sometimes, and I don’t think I have done that in the nearly two years since we became The Death of. In gearing up to put out a new record and figure out what our next steps are I in fact think that a step back is almost necessary. Adam and I have been brainstorming and catching up on administrative tasks, and I have been thinking a great deal about the collection of newer songs we have—both the ones that we’ve been playing for a while and the ones that I’m still working on to bring to the band as a whole. Even as the music business as people have known it lies in disarray, there is still some belief in the “album cycle” and I find this somewhat comforting, because I personally like albums and I don’t want them to die. But it’s definitely off-putting that now when you make a record you go to all this trouble recording something well, and putting songs in an order that has some meaning or logic or both, knowing that people are going to just crappify your tracks by converting them to the lowest-quality mp3s and that they will listen to them out of order, or only listen to one song and that’s it. It teaches one not to be too precious, or perhaps more precious and caring than ever before. But I could argue the flipside of all this, too, that freedom from the album and a climate that no longer buys into “album logic” personalizes the experience of music even further, gives listeners total freedom and allows them to have exactly what they want, no more, no less. Remember when you’d love a song or two and go out and buy a record and the rest of it sucked? Over. There is no mystery/wonder in buying music anymore–you can pretty much always try before you buy now. But then again, there were those albums you’d buy for a track or two only to discover that the rest of the music was even better than what you already knew you liked. See, I’m all for the mystery and wonder, the arguably deeper experience, but even as a young man I could be a dinosaur headed for extinction. Obviously the whole scenario is quite complex when you start peeling back the layers, for musicians and consumers both. Maybe I will talk more about this in future postings, because it’s definitely something I think about a lot. But I don’t want to go on and on about this right now.

Anyway, we’re going to make a new record, and people will do with it what they will. And hopefully we will like it, and they will like it, and you will like it, and it’ll all be good.

As much as I in some ways resent JetBlue’s whole approach to flying—stay plugged in constantly, even 30,000 feet in the air, and don’t eat real food, eat shitty potato chips that are supposed to seem less shitty ‘cause they are blue, and cookies that are less junky because they are “biscotti”—I do also kind of enjoy it. Especially since I don’t have cable, so I can catch up on my VH1 videos (if they’re showing any) or my Food Network or whatever. But I guess Netflix is never enough, because I love my in-flight movies, too. On the way down here I was going to watch the Simpsons movie, but was lured by Death Sentence, with Kevin Bacon in it, and Kelly Preston (who really is one of the best-looking moviestar women ever), and John Goodman, too. Anyway, holy shit. Sometimes it’s just more fun to go into a film knowing nothing at all about it. I am sure the critics panned this, and it was a blip on the cinematic radar screen, I think, because I barely remember it being out, but holy shit. The dude who makes the Saw movies knows how to gore it up, that’s for sure, and has a certain brand of gritty/grainy/gory cinema pretty much in the bag at this point. This movie is totally fucking insane, though, so overwrought and unbelievable that it’s totally riveting. I couldn’t stop watching as Kevin Bacon transforms from nerdy but cool risk analyst dad into skinheaded, resurrected, gun-toting, murdering, beyond-gangbanging tough guy in this amoral, eye-for-an-eye, gratuitously violent, B-movie piece of gold/trash. Once it got going, I literally couldn’t get up to go to the bathroom until it was over. Watch it and be entertained, if you like that sort of thing.

Have y’all seen the film Babel? I just finally saw it and found it quite stunning in many ways. It works on a very deep emotional level and brings out the similarities and differences among people across seemingly vast cultural/social/political boundaries. Embarrassingly, though, I had a particularly unique experience of this film because I unwittingly watched it incorrectly.

You see, for some reason, either by my hand or through some bizarro DVD glitch, when I watched the film there were no subtitles at all. Since Babel works in several different languages, more than half the film is not in my native tongue, nor was there any French or Spanish for me to pick out. So I watched the entire movie not understanding what many of the characters were saying, effectively just reading what was going on by behavior, facial expressions, and so on. I missed some key points, but I also felt like I got a lot of it.

Now you could argue that I am a total dumbass for not figuring out that this was an oversight on my part. But the film itself is what had me going, had me thinking it was not an oversight at all but a statement on the part of director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who is also responsible for the excellent films Amores Perros and 21 Grams. I didn’t mind not knowing everything that the characters were saying because I thought that this was kind of the point—the film deals so much in the divisions between people, their cultural (and LINGUISTIC) differences, and their inabilities to relate to one another’s experience of the world that I thought our man Inarritu was making some grand statement about this by forcing the viewer to experience the lack of understanding/communication right alongside the characters. So it didn’t really bother me at all, and I think it speaks well of Babel that it didn’t.

Ah, this is getting to be a long one. Anyway, I really liked this film, and wanted to read more about what others thought of such a daring piece of cinema, so I looked it up online and did some more detailed reading. The Times review mentioned some details about the characters that couldn’t possibly have been gleaned from the film as I saw it, like the bit about Chieko’s mother committing suicide by jumping off the balcony of their high-rise apartment. And the more I’m thinking about it, the more I’m like, Hmm, it really is hard to believe that a film people can barely understand would be nominated for seven Oscars. Uh, yeah. Adam and I often talk about movies, and he finally confirmed that I had been watching Babel all wrong. Here I was applauding my fellow Americans for their patience and their interest, and praising the Hollywood machine for accepting something so daring, but really I was just being a moron. Or an idealist? I watched Babel again, turning the subtitles on (Why were they off in the first place? Weird.). Yeah, it was better the second time. But maybe less interesting.