I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: IGGY AND THE STOOGES-“Job” (2013).

Nickelodeon’s favorite dad has just released a new album.  In the lead up to this song on NPR, Bob Boilen said that the live show that NPR streamed from Iggy and the Stooges was a matinée and there were kids as  well as adults there.  Who takes a kid to see Iggy Pop? Even if he was on The Adventures of Pete and Pete?

So this song is a dopey punk song and I love the guitars as the song starts–just classic punk sound and riffage. And then Iggy’s unmistakable voice “I gotta job…but it don’t pay shit.  I gotta job… and I’m sick of it.”  Is there any sentiment less authentic than Iggy Pop singing this?  Probably not.  And yet it’s a fun song for any working class guy to sing along to

And it’s frankly amazing that Iggy and the Stooges are still putting records out.

[READ: May 16, 2013] “Just Drive”

The five brief pieces in this week’s New Yorker are labeled as “Imagined Inventions.”  And in each one, the author is tasked with inventing something.

Shteyngart’s is clearly the most practical and is based on something the he knows already exists. He explains that he is unabashedly a terrible driver: “My greatest failure in life has been my inability to drive a car safely between two locations.”  This is despite the fact that he has always loved cars.  Right from the day that his father bought their first car and he saved up to buy a similar matchbox car (more similar when they painted it the same color), he has loved t he freedom that cars represented.  And I loved the idea that he and his family felt that although America was a large country, the road atlas made it seem like you could drive anywhere.

But Shteyngart’s driving problem seem to be more fundamental—an inability to tell left from right (the way his father tried to teach him is quite funny… if misguided).  And now that Shteyngart lives in the country, he needs to drive more than ever.

His invention is for a car that takes care of the driver like the Volvo model which features Collision Warning with Full Auto Brake and Pedestrian Detection (in which the car will brake if it senses something in front of you).  But what he really imagines is what he calls D2D or Driveway to Driveway or even better B2B Bar to Bedroom–a car that will not only pick you up at the bar, it will drive you home and march you right up to bed.

Give it twenty years, Gary