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Anybody want to come have dinner with me on the Upper West Side Friday night?  I need to go to Seppi’s to say goodbye to the one man who’s always been there for me since I moved to New York in 2003: Danny Stiles.

Danny Stiles (above right, next to Jackie Mason) is a spry octogenarian who has a ridiculous old-timey radio show on WNYC-AM (yes, only AM) every Saturday night from 8-10pm. The official title of the show is Big Band Sounds, but Danny usually refers to it on-air as The Danny Stiles Music Museum, and to himself as the Vicar of Vintage Vinyl. He mostly plays rare recordings of showtunes and American standards, sometimes from movies, mostly from the 1930s and 40s. In between songs, he tells long stories, sometimes about movie stars, but mostly about his life and times in New Jersey and his sixty years in radio. Sometimes he forgets what he was talking about mid story. It is awesome.

I discovered Danny Stiles my first weekend in New York, in the summer of 2003. I listened to the show on long nights studying in grad school, whilst closing up the pasta factory that I worked at in 2004-2005, on dates, at the start of all-nighters working on my still unfinished book, and pretty much any Saturday night that I spent alone in New York, and there were a lot of them. I will still be able to listen to Danny in Los Angeles, on the internet, but it won’t be the same. Mostly because it’ll be at 5:00.

So, to get to the point: every Friday night at the restaurant in the Parker Meridien on W. 56th street, Danny Stiles basically does his radio show, but with a live band. It starts at 8:30, and this Friday night (my last before I move to Los Angeles), I’m going to go there around the beginning of his show to eat dinner and spend one last night with Danny. I have a couple other things I should be at later that night, so I probably won’t be there long, but if you want to come with me for dinner, and we know each other in real life (or don’t, but know each other well enough on the internet for me to not be scared to have you at my dinner table), let me know.

Physical media is an albatross. Or so Wiley wrote on my Facebook wall. Behind me on my dining room table is the pile of physical media that I’m firmly determined to give away before I move to LA. There is another pile—of 40-odd books, maybe 20 records, and some DVDs in one of those black sleeve folder things—that I’m having trouble moving over to the dining room table pile.

I know that Wiley is probably right, and that it would feel terrific to show up in Los Angeles with nothing but a suitcase and a laptop (maybe not even that—my Macbook seems to be nearing its expiration date), to start a new life without these physical reminders of my various old lives.  I liked the light backpack bullshit part of Up in the Air.

Maybe I am an addict. Please, God, give me the courage to accept the things I cannot change … and also to give up the copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again that I’ve had for over ten years and have already shipped back and forth across the country three times.

I do not, under any circumstances, need my tribble mittens where I’m going. But I don’t think I can bear to give them up.

Today I wrote a thing about The White Hotel, the (for lack of a better four-word synopsis) surrealist erotic Holocaust novel that everyone from Barbra Streisand to David Lynch has attempted to turn into a film. Most recently attached to the project: Brittany Murphy and her creepy husband.

Above: the inside cover of my paperback copy of the book. For anyone wondering why this book is so hard to adapt, that image should go some way towards explaining — it’s almost a literal illustration.

I love it when my friends are profiled on thisrecording.