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Atlanta Highlights – 1st 24 Hours

The first obvious pleasure of my trip to Atlanta was the 25 minutes of turbulence flying down from NYC that required the flight attendants to sit.  That is always a reassuring moment for someone who dislikes flying.  “We know you are nervous, but don’t worry – you are not alone because the trained professionals are uncomfortable as well.”

Arriving in Atlanta’s airport, which is apparently in the city next to Atlanta because it is a 4 hour journey to baggage claim, which looks like something organized by someone from the 3rd World afflicted with ADD.

Got Wendy’s as my first meal in Atlanta’s airport and was asked by the woman if I would like a Coke to drink with my meal.  If Coca Cola were any more insecure they’d be Kobe Bryant’s daughters after Game 7 in front of the national media (one last shot before the off season).  Coca Cola – you are one of the most well known brands in the world and Atlanta is your home.  We get it.  You don’t have to force it on us like some athlete whose glory days were in high school, but still forces you to watch highlight tapes and look at his trophies fifteen years later.  Perhaps managers of restaurants in Atlanta are required to bitch slap employees who don’t properly pimp out Coca Cola.

I took the MARTA train, presumably named after the little blond girl in School of Rock and had only an 10 minute walk to the hotel.  Unfortunately Atlanta is very warm and that ten minute walk of dragging a suitcase in blue jeans transformed me into Patrick Ewing at the foul line by the time I arrived at check-in.

The first show at The Punchline was interesting. The emcee was half Jamaican, half white, from Canada.  Obviously, the crowd might have sensed some redundancy when a half-Haitian, half-white guy with a French name took the stage fifteen minutes later.  But I felt like I had a good set (B+), until the headliner Dale Jones got on stage and absolutely murdered.  So for the rest of the night I just kept repeating my mantra for Southern shows, “At least you are not getting booed at The Stardome, at least you are not getting booed at The Stardome.”

My favorite joke of the night, for the sole reason that it was the first time I’d told it was, “I’m 31 and HIV-negative, which means I have only a year left til I break Magic Johnson’s record.”

After the show was done I watched the rest of the Lakers-Celtics game a few people from the club, the result of which obviously pleased me to no end.

Aiming for two A performances tonight.  8 pm and 10 pm tonight.

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Aging Gracelessly

Brett Favre has become a big joke to many sports fans with his inability to stop playing football and pronounce his name correctly.  This is often the case with great athletes, unable to hang up the cleats or sneakers or skates because their lives have had no other real goal or purpose other than excelling at sports.  But that is excusable in a sense because to attain the level of excellence they have achieved they had to be single minded from a young age and dedicated beyond reason to get where they are.  Sort of like Michael Jackson minus the all the abuse.

But it seems to me that from Facebook and fantasy sports to Harry Potter and plastic surgery our culture is obsessed with staying in our teens and twenties no matter what.  And to compensate for this, we’ve begun to add the words “classic” and “historic” to things that have not really obtained classic or historic status in any objective sense of the word.  Harry Potter is not a “classic” as is printed on the book covers.  And unlike its true classic predecessors, The Lord of The Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, which have withstood a test of time, Potter has no deeper meaning or societal commentary that is usually necessary for something to gain elevation beyond pop relevance.  But to justify our culture’s unwarranted obsession with things puerile and fleeting we tag them with words like classic so that instead of feeling vapid we feel like part of something important.  And boy do we live in a golden age of importance!

Ipod now refers to the regular iPod as “iPod classic” – how many decades was Coca Cola in business before they threw classic on their beverage.  Watching the E! channel against my will yesterday I heard Ryan Seacrest make a bold proclamation that the cast of Dancing With The Stars this Fall was the largest in the show’s “History! ” It just seemed to cheapen the word History.  I think of History in terms decades and centuries, not in terms of a few television seasons.  To say nothing of the fact that the word “star” is still a misnomer for this show.

At this age I was already "classic" in today's terms. As opposed to the bow tie look, which was and is classic in the more traditional sense.
At this age I was already “classic” in today’s terms. As opposed to the bow tie look, which was and is classic in the more traditional sense.

Fame has always been fleeting and cheap, but even by that low standard it feels like we are actually living through a time where the value of celebrity is being downgraded.  If he had known what we know now Andy Warhol might have re-stated, everyone will get their 2-3 seasons of fame.  Like the Kardashians.

But to quote DeNiro from Heat, there is a flip side to this coin.  While older people are trying to resist maturity, their kids, left under the watchful and protective eyes of cell phones and the Internet, are in a hurry to leave childhood.  I watched Big yesterday, the film with Tom Hanks.  And in it he plays a 12 year old boy who likes playing with toys and does not know much about girls, etc.  It was a fun, humorous film and completely unrelatable to kids today.  Nowadays to get a kid to act like that and have the audience believe it, it would have to be a 7 year old, because by 12 Josh Baskins c. 2009 would be sexting on his iPhone and encouraging Elizabeth Perkins to do that thing he saw in a porno.

If I were to make a satirical film about the future it would just feature a society filled with people who looked 24 – some would be 13 year olds trying to look and act older, neglecting the fun and innocence of youth; others would be 58 trying through surgery and fashion to look younger and neglecting the wisdom and quality that can come from a long and fulfilling life.  Then there would be a group of 24 year olds going, “What the fu-k is going on?”  And it will star Seth Rogan playing all three since he is the only actor in his 20s who acts like a teenager, but looks much older than he actually is.

The Empire State Building was built around 80 years ago in 14 months.  I look around Manhattan and see buildings one-fifth the size taking five times as long to build.  Technology serves a legitimate function, but I feel like our culture in general is taking major steps backwards, while the bells and whistles of technology give us the appearance of progress.  As my Uncle is fond of saying, “Don’t confuse movement with action.”  Right now it feels like our culture is making a lot of movement, but not much action.

Now back to my Nintendo Wii.