Toward an Efficient Democracy - Hot Gossip Poll Edition

My guiltiest Internet pleasure, Gawker.com, is conducting a poll to name the hottest gossip columnists. Astonishingly, Daily News Gatecrasher Ben Widdicombe, who is a friend of mine but who is also one of the most handsome men in the city, is not in the lead! Go now and vote for him. I assure you, it's the right choice.

My Favorite Things (And I Promise Not to Mention Starbucks Cookies)

I thought I would share some of the things that have my affection and constant attention this summer: KROQ Classics Internet Radio is rocking my working hours. I grew up in LA in the 1980s, where and when KROQ was the cool New Wave Mecca. It played X and the Red Hot Chili Peppers when no one else did, as well as weird old-school rap when it was still very young-school. In the past 20 minutes, I've heard W.O.R.K. by Bow Wow Wow, Girls on Film by Duran Duran, I Will Follow by U2, Stand and Deliver by Adam and the Ants and Mental Hopscotch by Missing Persons. But KROQ also throws in lots of obscure stuff that brings me right back to my 13 year old self, like I Love Paul by Nina Hagen or World Destruction by Zone Time. (KROQ is also the home of D.J. Rodney Bingenheimer, an excellent LA character who figured prominently in my youth - as well as Davy Jones' and Susanna Hoffs'. If you haven't seen Mayor of Sunset Strip, the documentary about Rodney, you should.)

Other Music Newsletter is, for my money, better than the Rock Snob Dictionary. It's one thing to know your stuff about Captain Beefheart or The Wrecking Crew, but the weirdoes at Other Music will definitely help you to one-up even the most savvy music geeks. For instance, have you ever heard of Mickey Newbury? I hadn't, but now I'm dying to hear his album. Did you know that there is a compilation of funky 60s-era female singers from Bangkok, called Thai Beat a Go-Go? There are three, actually. Do you know anything about The Watt's 103rd Street Rhythm Band? Last Christmas, I got HG an album called 94 Baker Street, a compilation of songs recorded for Apple Records. You just don't find this stuff anywhere else. Plus, if you are sick of all things commercial, their new releases are often refreshingly unknown. Sometimes they hype things a little too much - I got the silly Blue Van album on their recommendation, but I also got an EP by Tuesday Weld, so that makes us even. I still don't get why the entire staff is in love with Animal Collective's Sung Tongs. I've only heard a few samples but they were definitely a turn off.

Newsletter honorable mention goes to Film Forum Newsletter, which comes to me every Wednesday with its maddening challenge question about one of the films it's currently playing. Remember in Ghost World, when the guy in the wheel chair at the coffee house finds answers to the trivia questions on his laptop and gets a free coffee every day? I am that guy. I'm obsessed with finding answers to these questions and sending them in right away. The prize is a measly pair of free tickets on a weeknight, when as a member I get tickets for $5 anyway. Still, it must be my little researcher brain or my need for approval that has me scrambling for obscure information each week. I've known the answer without researching it exactly once out of the 50 or so times I've sent in a response. I've gotten the answer correct every time, though. But they put the correct responses together and draw the name of the winner at random. I've never won.

Finally, I plan to do a post about summer reading, but the book I'm currently reading, Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, deserves its own special place on this list. Because I love all things hipster-1960s, I've had a copy of Southern's novel, Candy, since I was a kid. But I've never read any of his other stuff until now. Southern is a wacko/perverse comic writer who helped write the screenplays of Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider, among other great things. He also wrote for Saturday Night Live during the first years, and National Lampoon's (all Harvard grads who go on to write satire for Hollywood or magazines worship Southern, it's a prerequisite). This strange collection of his work includes interviews with him, letters he sent to magazines and friends, stories and scenes he has written. Some of it is truly sick, but much of it is brilliantly funny, and even the sick stuff stays with you for days. And I love his swinging attitude. He's a likeable Peter Sellers, or a smart Austin Powers.

So Long Sallie Mae, You Bloodsucking Whore

That's right, as of yesterday, my student loans are finally paid off!

Thank you, thank you. I am so honored. Thanks to my loan administrator, Sallie Mae Corp., for always being there. And I mean always. We've had our ups and downs, but I can honestly say I'm leaving this relationship with far fewer hard feelings than I had expected. Never mind that it was a 10 year loan and I graduated 11 years ago and I technically still had a year's worth of payments to make before I was done. I don't understand the math, but I trust that everything was on the up and up.

I also want to thank my parents, for having saved nothing for my college education. Trust fund babies are so overrated, as are kids whose parents pay for their schooling. What do these people know about struggle, sacrifice, and furnishing your apartment with items found on the street? Particularly, I'd like to thank Dad, who once seriously implied that tuition could not amount to much more than a couple of hundred dollars a semester. Even though I chose a public school, you missed the mark by a thousand or two, not including the little things like food, board and books. Oh the blissful ignorance of the divorced, long-distance father. Adorable! Remember that time, during freshman year, when I called desperate for some money to get food? You suggested I go to 7-11, cook a burrito in the microwave, and eat it right there without paying for it. "What are they going to do to you?" You asked. I demurred, and lived another day on butter and brown sugar sneaked from my roommate's refrigerator. And I'm stronger for it.

Next, I'd like to thank the University of California at Berkeley. You took pity on a pauper like me, gave me the best education money can buy at a very affordable price, and taught me that Stanford is for Dan Quayle fans. So what if you did nothing to help me find a job, or prepare me for the fact that I would have to toil as a secretary before I got anywhere anyway? So what if, on several occasions, I was tempted to ask you for my money back? Now that our debt sheet is cleared, I think of you fondly.

Thanks, too, to the editor who assigned me that article about a new charitable thingymajig. Yes, at times it felt the piece was truly a labor of disinterest, and the rewrites were hair-pullingly, computer screen-hittingly frustrating. But with the paycheck it provided I was able to do something, if not truly altruistic, at least beneficial to me: give a big fuck you to Ms. Mae.

And of course, I can't forget to mention my starter magazine jobs. You know who you are. Thank you for keeping me out of journalism school, and away from additional outrageous debt. Particularly FP - I had no idea that two years working under a bitchy tyrant at an understaffed publication would be equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars blown on a J-degree at Columbia or Northwestern, but it was.

Finally, I would like to share this honor with my husband, the wonderful Herr Guitar. When we wed, I gained much more than a partner, much more than a few All Clad pans and a Pyrex set... I gained another student loan payment. Thanks to you, darling, I can look forward to the triumph of having helped to pay off another student loan - in about 18 years or so. I can't wait.

Pity the US Housefrau

I am so looking forward to maternity leave. It's like this brass ring: 12 weeks of paid leave to spend with my baby. After that, who knows? I can't imagine anything beyond those blissful (or hellacious, depending on my spawn) three months.

When I first asked my HR rep about my company's benefits, I was told that under the Family Medical Leave Act they were not required to provide me with anything. Because the company has less than 50 employees. However, they generously do offer 12 weeks paid leave. I was thrilled. That is generous.

But then I hear that in Canada, everyone is entitled to 14 months of paid maternity leave! In Sweden, the father and mother decide who gets the family's 16 months of leave at 80 percent pay. In the industrialized world of over 160 countries, the U.S. is only preferable to three - Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland - in terms of what we offer expectant mothers. Isn't that sick?

The Family Medical Leave Act entitles women to 12 weeks of job-protected leave. Employers can decide if they want to provide workers with pay during that time, but they don't have to. Furthermore, companies with less than 50 employees don't have to comply with FMLA. When my mom had me, she just got laid off, but at least she was covered by unemployment. Clinton wanted to extend unemployment benefits to women on maternity leave, but it was overruled when W took office.

Once I heard this, I no longer felt so blessed. I mean, I'm lucky that I'm getting paid for that time, some people have to take disability leave. But 12 weeks is nothing in the life of a baby. How can I effectively plan my next move, given such a short period of time and distractions like diaper changes and episodes of Judge Judy? Is it too late to move to Canada?

Fun with Bertolucci

Yesterday, Herr Guitar and I went through our typical Sunday routine of brunch and a movie. Brunch was at Great Jones. Supposedly, Basquiat used to eat there when not starving. They have good biscuits, good coffee, and a great jukebox. Yesterday's music included a song called, "New York's a Lonely Town (When You're the Only Surfer Boy Around)," by the Trade Winds. I know this song because when I was a 60s surf-music obsessed teen, I got my hands on a surf music compilation tape and it was one of the gems. (I lived in California, but loved the idea of getting the hell out of there and missing it. How poignant was the lyric, "I feel so bad each time, I look out there and find, My Woody's outside, covered in snow.") I still have the tape, but I've never heard that song anywhere else.

Oh, and another Great Jones selling point: We once took my brother there and Mark Ibold, the bassist from Pavement, served us our breakfast. How's that for hip?

We weren't sold on seeing a movie. I am willing to see "The Wedding Crashers," "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," and even "Bad News Bears" or "Hustle and Flow." HG is decidedly not. So I checked the old standby, the Film Forum, to see what's up there. They had the 1970 Bernardo Bertolucci film, "The Conformist." Pauline Kael once called the film, "A triumph of feeling and style," and our membership to FF gets us in for $5 a pop, so why not?

When we got to the theater, there was already a small line. I told HG to get in line while I got tickets. Then as I walked back to meet him, I noticed him pointing wildly at the line in front of him. I thought he was trying to help me locate him, but then I noticed, standing on line about three people ahead of him, was Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth. HG's hero. He got out of line to get another ticket, but the people he was in front of wouldn't save his spot. So as he proceeded to the back of the line, HG called out, "Hi Thurston."

A little backstory: The members of Sonic Youth are very approachable celebrities. Any New York indie rock fan worth her salt has seen either Thurston, his wife/bassist Kim Gordon, or guitarist Lee Renaldo out and about at one point (I've seen all three, multiple times). Anyone with the desire or nerve to have spoken to them knows that they're extremely cool.

Thurston may be the most approachable. And when HG said "Hi," he stopped and talked to us. We offered him a spot in line (it was only fair). We chatted about music, the Dinosaur Jr. show at SummerStage, Vincent Gallo, wealth in America, the line at the Film Forum, and the new Gus Van Sant movie Thurston just did music on, "Last Days." In fact, the friend he was meeting was Michael Pitt, the star of, among other films, "Last Days" and another Bertolucci film, "The Dreamers." Pitt arrived looking cute in his ripped t-shirt, and was really friendly as well.

Oh, the movie was great. It was creepy and beautifully filmed, and I think that "The Godfather" Parts 1 and 2 borrowed a lot of its look and style directly from it. The place was packed with old folks - more so than usual - and I was lucky to be sitting behind a 300+ pound man who moved his head from side to side every five seconds. Why is it that whenever I go to see a subtitled movie at the Film Forum I end up sitting behind this guy? It hurts to move your head back and forth like that - I know because I end up having to follow him just to read the dialogue.

Despite the ensuing neck ache, it was a great New York afternoon. Where else can you make a spur of the moment decision to see a restored masterpiece and end up casually meeting a hot young actor and a guitar god?