Armchair Therapy

Goodbye, Blogger...

2004-09-09T02:22:00.000-03:00

...it's been fun. But you've failed me once too often. Like today, when I couldn't post at all for awhile. Ah well. In any case, I'm jumping to my own site...

Hopefully, I'll be able to spruce it up a bit more over the next couple of months. Maybe when it gets ludicrously cold outside and I'll want to do nothing more than curl up by a warm laptop for the evening...

Anyone who wants to come and visit is more than welcome.

World War III: Electric Boogaloo

2004-09-08T11:48:00.000-03:00

I admit it -- I'm cynical. I'm a dyed in the wool cynical bastard. When news came from Russia of a horrific hostage and siege scenario the second thing I thought was, "That sounds way too convenient." The first thing I thought was, "God, how awful." And then, recent "god, that's awful" events made me follow the next logical conclusion, which is: it's all a big plan. It either works deliberately (they paid someone to do something horrible in order to justify their actions) or unintentionally (they were so lax in their efforts and deliberately belligerent in their provocations, that they only had to wait for someone to do something horrific) and suddenly your government can get carte blanche to do pretty much whatever it wants in the guise of "security" or "safety." And, bam, you're living in a totalitarian dictatorship again. Wow, suddenly it's 1939 all over again. Instead of villifying an undeserved ethnic minority, we'll villify a religious one. Sure, whatever works in the service of creating totalitarian dictatorships the world over. And then we get to use our fancy weaponry and kill anyone we don't like without having to explain it and...hmm..sounding all too familiar to a certain country that I'm living in. Now, with Russia on the similar warpath, it's only a matter of time before things get way out of hand. Did anyone else read the Cat in the Hat when they were growing up? I'm always reminded of how thing 1 & thing 2 weren't able to get that stain out and in all of their odd efforts to do so, ended up spreading it even further. Violence begets violence in an endless cycle that then creates poverty (which begets violence). Asimov once wrote that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. At this stage of the game, we're dealing with a lot of people who have violated the Peter Principle (being promoted just beyond one's level of competency -- everyone in positions of power have gone 2 or 3 steps beyond their level of competency). And it doesn't look very good for the rest of the world. I wonder if the Doomsday Clock is milliseconds from midnight yet or not...

Hope this cheered everyone up on this gray Wednesday.

This conversation never happened

2004-09-02T23:17:00.000-03:00

"Hello?"
"Hi, Mrs. Whimple?"
"Yes...who is this?"
"My name is Eli, I'm living in New York City and I'm calling you today to ask who you think you might be voting for in November."
"Oh, well...I was thinking that Bush was doing such a nice job, I'd just vote for him."
"What exactly is he doing that is a 'nice job?'"
Pause. "Well, not so much a nice job, just that I think he's a nice guy, I guess."
"Let me cut to the chase -- I tend to think that the only reason you can even consider supporting him is that you believe that abortion is wrong, gays shouldn't get married, and you believe that he's 'decisive.' Is that about where you stand?"
"Umm...yes, I suppose so."
"Okay, well let me run something by you, if I may. I was here in New York City when the GOP was having its little soiree. And I had friends who were arrested because they were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. They spent days -- not hours -- in a motor oil and asbestos filled warehouse picking up god knows what. Because they were standing in the wrong place."
"Where exactly are you going with this?"
"Where I'm going is, let's just say for argument's sake, you were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"Yes? I suppose it could happen."
"It really happens every day -- someone crosses the street and a car happens to be making a weird turn and they get hit."
"That happened to my cousin Maurice."
"I'm terribly sorry to hear that."
"Oh, that's okay. Maurice just broke his hip and he was looking for a good reason to slow down."
"Oh, okay. So, you can imagine being in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"Yes, I guess so."
"Well, don't you think that maybe it ought to be the desire of your government to minimize those wrong places and wrong times. And not -- as was the case in New York City this past week -- to maximize the wrong place and wrong time."
"I guess I don't follow, exactly."
"Do you believe in God?"
"Yes, I do. I have a strong faith in God."
"That's good."
"And our president does, too, I'll have you know."
"Yes, I was aware of that. Let me ask you something -- you don't believe that gays should marry, correct?"
"Yes, I think it's an abomination of God's will."
"All right. Well, let me just say for example that God speaks to our president at some point and he says, 'Good going with those gays, George. Now, would you mind taking on that peculiar Protestant problem, for me.'"
"Excuse me? Protestant problem?"
"I hear that there are -- and this is purely hypothetical -- Protestants getting married. And that's just not right. Because they aren't born again. They don't believe in the right things."
"What you're saying is ridiculous?"
"Is it? What kind of God would tell you that it's okay to fence off some people, just because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And you've created this state of wrong. So, you could easily designate anyone in that dimension -- do you like chocolate? Well, maybe God has decided that no one should eat chocolate anymore. And people who do, should be fenced up and put in a motor oil infested warehouse for days at a time."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying, Mrs. Whimple, that things that people believe in -- for whatever their reasons -- are completely arbitrary. And it's not really our government's job to make people believe one thing or another. That's where the government does not belong. And I believe -- and I think this past week in New York City nicely backs up my assumptions -- that the current in power administration wants to get into the thought police business. They want to tell you what you can and cannot believe. And -- based on the long traditional history of people who talk to God on a regular basis -- what is right and wrong can shift at any moment. First, gays can't get married. Then people can't assemble freely in the street. Before you know it, we've got to do something about the jews. Or hispanics. Or blacks. Or whatever. And the only road away from this dismal fascist future is to raise up your voice and say that it's not the future that you want. That terrorism is awful. And the kind of intimidation and intolerance and thought control that is being practiced by the propagandists and policy wonks of the Republican party is no different than what a group of people such as al-Queda are doing. That's what I'm saying."
Silence.
"Mrs. Whimple?"

It's all about the guns.

2004-09-02T11:18:00.000-03:00

Noticeably absent in the highlights reported by the media from the speeches last night is any mention of the economy. I'll have to check the full transcript, but it seems odd that -- as a capitalist country, which essentially lives and dies at the hand of its economy -- not focusing on this might be seen as a gaping hole in someone's stump speech. I'm sure that will be rectified when they start touting all of the minimum wage jobs that have been created, completely ignoring the lack of funding for education (and therefore trained, smart, capable future American entrepeneurs) and focusing instead on more funding for guns. Because, really, guns don't kill people...they make a country grow! Hey, if we have enough guns, we don't need to have reasonable, sane, sensible, intelligent, creative, capable citizens. We'll just find someone who does have those things and bully them until they give it to us. It worked for GWB in elementary school (probably), it'll work for the country now. So, look out world...and pony up your milk money now before we get really angry and devote our entire budget to buying all sorts of crazy weaponry. You've been warned.

This has been a message endorsed by the Society for Fascism in America (RNC) (Betcha didn't know that's what those letters stood for -- is it their fault that they never learned to spell? No education funding!)

whoa.

2004-09-02T02:52:00.000-03:00

This is just a brief jotting of a note -- whilst I stew in my infuriated rant at what has happened to NYC in the guise of "security" (i.e. Martial Law) -- I was informed via email that the documentary that I directed/shot/edited on the gay marriages in San Francisco was accepted into the Seattle Gay & Lesbian Film Festival! This is indeed a very happy transpiring for me. Though, it means I will have to spend some long nights actually finishing it in its full High-definition glory...well, that's the kind of extra work that I can get behind. Hope to have some more happy news to report to counterbalance the unending supply of crap that seems to permeate the rest of the world stage.

Pot and Kettle

2004-08-31T15:27:00.000-03:00

This just in. Glad to see flip-flopping isn't a partisan sport.

Though, I personally don't think changing your mind is a capital offense -- apparently it is. It seems hard to base the entire criticism of your campaign rival on something that you in close proximity of two statements, no less, have done yourself. Even after staking your entire criticism on the said rival on this particular "flaw." Personally, I could care less whether he thinks we can or can't win a war on terror, largely because such a thing doesn't exist. You can't fight a war against a concept. It's just not possible. The war on drugs -- which isn't really a concept so much as it is an inanimate object -- proved this much over the past two decades. It might be helpful to reframe all of these questions away from a war-like mentality. Perhaps, we can think that we've jumped ahead of this evolutionarily speaking. Though, it might be hard for some people to get their walnut sized brains around it. Perhaps, instead of a war on terror, we could have a picnic lunch against injustice?

I'll make the 'tater salad.

Infuriating.

2004-08-29T22:12:00.000-03:00

It is without question infuriating to watch mainstream news media mislead and in general misreport, skew and bungle facts and deceive the entire population at large. In an AP story, as reprinted on Yahoo.com, the reporter claimed over 100,000 people were involved in a march against the current administration. Yet, the headline they chose to use said "tens of thousands protest." Deliberately misleading, when the facts in the story state over 100,000. Tens of thousands is 50 or 70. 100,000 is...well, obviously the AP can't do the math, so I'll give them a hand. It's over 100,000. It's more than 10,000. By an entire decimal place. A factor of 10, if you will.

Aside from that deliberate mislead, the facts are wrong. How do I know this? I struggled for 3 hours to walk 10 freaking blocks! That's how crowded seventh avenue was. If you line up people body to body across the breadth of seventh avenue and then stretch them the length of seventh avenue, you get more than 100,000 people. Especially when you stretch that over the course of 20 blocks.

I was also very impressed with the near Beirut style barricade technique that the NYPD employed as the street approached MSG. It was quite claustrophobia inducing, and felt very much like a blind trap of sorts, winnowing the parade/march into a thinner and thinner street, as if to pen in any possible protest. Or escalate the opportunity for violence. I wasn't sure which. I was glad to have been represented...oh, I'm sorry -- MISREPRESENTED -- by the thoroughly incompetent and highly specious mainstream media that reports on the event. Still, it was worth going. I dont' think a convention has ever been protested with that kind of volume.

I also must say that the reports I hear from the critical mass (which I very nearly attended and would probably be scratching this missive out from a sludge covered jail cell, had I done that) are disturbing at the minimum. It sounds as if the police (as they did when critical mass was at it's most influential in SF several years ago) DELIBERATELY set out to create conflict and foment violence. Nice. I guess they learned that a good offense is the best defense. That ought to be the Republican's motto. It seems to fit all too perfectly in everything they do. They are, without question, patently offensive.

reality?

2004-08-25T13:01:00.000-03:00

This just in. Apparently an earnest ad for a television show on TBS. The kicker, for me, is that you're competing for $6000. Six. Thousand. Not a million. Not even 10 thousand, which seems like it might be a nice round number.

Have we sunk this low?

Is this the harbinger of a new sludgy slate of reality television wherein people do stupid, asinine things for no other reason than to be on television in the end? I envision a future world of America where everyone is on television. I think, with blogs, we've begun to see that evolution start. Everyone will have their own reality show, and without any prize. They will be as narcissistic and self-indulgent as the neverending supply of human thoughts can be. And there will be viewers who will want to tune in to see what stupid thing you'll do next. People will have hats with direct satellite feeds back to their laptops where they will encode the daily drama of their life. Look, I'm walking down the street. Oh, wait, is that a dog? Maybe I'll pet it...oh no, it bit me! Indeed this kind of 24/7 surveillance is not a new idea (George Orwell, and probably people before him even). I'm even reminded of the prescient television show from the early 80s called Max Headroom, which foretold a media clogged future.

Is this a better world? I would argue, no.

I was thinking the other night as I walked down the street listening to the irascible chatter from everyone on their cell phones that the level of human noise over the past few years has increased dramatically. Does anyone else remember a time when you could assume that if someone said something out loud near you that they were actually talking to you? I feel a little like pulling a DeNiro taxi driver routine more often than not on the sidewalks of new york. It also has diminished the importance of any utterance. By sheer volume, interesting things become banal. Important items, get lost in the deluge. I think this is the true effect of the information age.

Laugh or cry?

2004-08-20T16:03:00.000-03:00

It's a tough choice.

We live in a fucked up society right now. I really ought to renounce my chosen profession, all my worldly possessions and retire to a cave somewhere to work on inventing a time travel machine, wherein I could go back in time and fix some of the horrible, horrible misdeeds that have occurred. For one, I'd re-enfranchise the thousands of people in Florida who "decided" that last election. Or at least get enough good blackmailing material on Scalia and Thomas to sway the vote the appropriate direction. Whatever works.

In any case, this humorous tidbit makes me chuckle a bit and then get very, very, very sad. Why? Well, the funniest part about it to me is that someone with the name Edward (or Ted) Kennedy is on a no-fly list. Or similar to that. I would love to see what other odd names have made it onto the no-fly list. This highly protected document is undoubtedly chock full of incorrectly identified names. And to Shakespeare, I say, apparently a lot is in a name. And no, it doesn't smell quite the same.

In any case, I wonder if in the hands of someone with a more humane and human sensibility, if the tragic events of 2001 might've given rise to something incredible, something that may have changed the face of this world, something that could have miraculously taken hold of the outpouring of goodwill that a tragic incident can sometimes cause. I wonder if in the hands of someone with an ounce of compassion or even a smidgen of empathy (or, hey, a group of someones with either compassion or empathy), what intelligent and worthwhile movements that they may have crafted, using goodwill and healing instead of hate and fear and terror. It may have been a wondrous century to live through. Instead, it is nothing more than where all the rest of human society has trampled before, through the Genghis Khans and Alexanders and Caesars of history's tomes lay waste. I guess it would be too much for me to hope that we might rise above being base and crass and unruly and fearful little creatures, like cowering mogwai waiting for our inner gremlin to commence smashing things up. Maybe if the world were more matriarchal. But even that would give rise to the same sort of sharp vituperation, I imagine.

Perhaps the time machine would help save this world from itself. But, more likely, it would just wreak an even kookier future that would make Orwell think things were amiss. To think, he was only 20 years early in his date predictions. I wonder if we'll make contact with a large monolith in 2021.

Americans: Stupid or Daft, #2

2004-08-20T15:56:00.000-03:00

Never thought I'd have to make this a running tally...or maybe, it should come as no surprise.

I like the end of the story where his parents are happy that he actually is good at something. The only thing that most Americans are any good at, apparently. But, hey, it's good to support your kids.

Food reviews

2004-08-19T00:47:00.000-03:00

I read New York magazine on occasion, often to peruse the latest and greatest food reviews (among other things). I like reading about food, because food is like possibility. There always is this kind of chance that you could go out that particular evening (any evening) and eat a sumptuous sensuous dinner. Granted, I can't afford most of the places that show up between those particular glossy pages. But on occasion a locale pops out. For instance, pizza. This is something that I can most definitely afford as a meal, and the place reviewed was near enough to make the slight trip worthwhile, as it was billed as one of the best pies in the city. That's some pretty high talk for a city of this size. Particularly one with a claim to fame -- New York Style pizza. The location: Franny's, on Flatbush Avenue bordering Park Slope and Prospect Heights (I believe...maybe Fort Greene).

Franny's has a nice plate glass window with bright orange lettering on it to identify it. Once inside, we were told that we would have a fifteen minute wait to sit at a table. Sitting at a counter by the window was immediate. We chose to go immediately and were given the delightful vantage point of the people walking by. And the parked cars on the street, too. It only takes about 1:21 for a car to take an empty parking space, according to some very unscientific calculations. But, anyway, on to dinner. We ordered a sun-gold tomato crostini and a basil pesto ricotta pizza to split between the two of us. Franny's claim to fame, I suppose, is its insistence on sustainable foodstuffs -- using local suppliers, organic whenever possible (I believe). The crostini was amazing. The sweetness of the tomato was tempered with a perfect splash of a very rich olive oil and a not too sharp balsamic vinegar. The crostini itself was crisp and chewy and still warm as it arrived. I could've eaten a tray full of these and probably been completely sated with the meal. The service was friendly and attentive, even for us losers at the spare counter top. The atmosphere, though, was a bit too loud. It seemed more like a bar that served pizzas, in some ways (as my dining partner claimed). Not a great first date spot, truth be told. And with a decent location and a positive review, business will probably be very good for the forseeable future. If you can hack the noise factor, though, the design of the room is rather nice and clean. Angular lines and brick walls.

But, yes, the pizza. The reason for coming. I have to admit, it was good. But it wasn't that good. The basil pesto tasted very mild, relying on the natural essence of the basil to power it, instead of covering it up with garlic (as so many pestos seem to do). The effect was quite lovely and natural, without burning the taste buds out. The ricotta was a beautiful rich and mellow counterpoint to the tang of the pesto. And the crust was flavored well with the coal oven taste. But, it's texture and consistency left a little something to be desired. It was neither the super thin, crisp traditional Italian pie style, nor was it the NY doughy slab. The middle was wafer thin, but the edge crust was beyond doughy, especially when it should've been crisper. Overall, I was a little let down, perhaps by expectations. But, it was some very fresh and tasty food (I was a little surprised that no "normal" salad was offered on the menu, but maybe the kitchen is too small to deal with that), though not the best pie I've ever had. Nor, probably, the best in the city. Maybe not even the best in Brooklyn. Hopefully, I'll find out who deserves that title, soon enough.

I recommend the ice cream shop (that seems like a deserted candy store from the outside) a few doors down. Wow. That's some tasty gelato that they had. And a very friendly scooper, too. I'm heading back there for ice cream again...I can feel it.

Make it up as you go along

2004-08-17T18:41:00.000-03:00

Yesterday was my first day attempting something very different. I went to improv class, as held at the "world famous" Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. The classes are held in a small office above 23rd Street. The room itself seems like half storage, half disused sweatshop. A set of plastic molded bolted down chairs sit facing a small rubberized mat (the stage, I suppose). The improvisers trickled in and mostly sat in silence. One or two started introducing one another, but it was a fairly subdued group. In a moment, the instructor started up her introductory spiel and the improv class was going. A few late stragglers made it in under the bell. Then it was off to the races. Sort of. The kind of improvisation practiced and preached by the UCB Theater is called "The Harold" and is a long-form version of improvisation more akin to dramatic/comedic theatrical pieces than to the short and snappy skits that I recall from other improvisational escapades. The instructor talks about finding the truth of the scene and playing to your highest level of intelligence. My mind starts to draw a blank. Hmm...what if I'm not intelligent enough to play to the level of my intelligence? It could get pretty existential in here in no time.

Thankfully, we then spent what seemed like the next hour doing warm-up introductions. Basically a long extended riff on a name game. So, now, not only do I know everyone's name, but I also know what their name rhymes with. I know more than that, too. In fact, the only three requirements that the instructor laid out was to read a required text, see 30 minutes of improv a week, and go drinking with your classmates afterward. Normally that seems easily enough -- except I don't drink. (I get to join the pregnant woman, a lovely woman who is also an art therapist as I found out over seltzers and ginger ale, in the non-drinking group).

After the name game, we played a version of sing-a-long. This game, basically took me back to my least favorite memory from elementary school. In elementary school, we were supposed to write a short story (I loved writing short stories) but to use as many song titles as we could in the service of the story (I knew next to zero song titles because music was not part of my family's social outreach -- they listened to Mozart and Beethoven. Maybe I'd hear a Peter, Paul, and Mary song...maybe). I stayed up waiting for KTEL commercials to glean enough song titles in order to make a cogent story and the teacher said I needed to try harder in comments on the story. Ouch. I had that long momentary flashback as the song game started. I found that I couldn't remember any songs, let alone the lyrics to any of them, let alone sing the one stanza of lyric that I did remember. Thankfully, this game didn't last long and the point of the class (thankfully) was not to unduly humiliate students.

After this embarrassment, improv class moved into an honest and dishonest debate segment, essentially to teach us how to believe strongly in the moment that we were living in and to sell our convictions. I argued vehemently that some human relationships are governed by the laws of physics. And then we were supposed to argue with conviction something that we didn't believe in (there were the usual GWB is the smartest guy in the world kinds of approaches). I argued that Godzilla was going to save us. The woman who was working with me (the "listener" was supposed to agree vehemently with you), played along beautifully. It was quite a nice little silly moment. I still get very nervous when I'm on stage and my voice tightens and I have a huge adrenalin rush and have trouble staying in the moment. Maybe that will go away with practice, though I don't know if it ever goes away. It's almost like I can see myself from outside myself and think, "I'm not usually like this. Why do I sound like this?" It's very odd.

In any case -- it's a nice rush and I can sense a level of camaraderie that may develop through the course of the several weeks of class among the students as we prepare for a final presentation. Thoroughly recommended. And if you're around, you can fork over the $5 and come see my final performance on October 4. I think. More on that later...

America: Stupidest people or just plain daft?

2004-08-17T18:33:00.000-03:00

You make the call.

From an AP story about GWB's falling approval rating on the Iraq War:
"Iraq was getting out of hand," said Kim Rivers, a 35-year-old Republican who works as a teacher's aide in Champlain, N.Y. "It should have been done a long time ago."

Firstly, where does the AP find these nitwits? And secondly, what is in the drinking water that makes people in the middle of nowhere so ill-informed? I would love to know exactly how Ms. Rivers believes that Iraq was getting out of hand. And maybe she wasn't around in 1989 (though, being 35 years old, one would presume that her memory extends that far back)...but it WAS done a long time ago. Didn't anyone else get that horrible deja vu feeling?

Sound

2004-08-14T12:08:00.000-03:00

I had the fortune of taking in a concert at Joe's Pub a lovely old room with much newfangled soundproofing that is attached to the public theater in NYC. Located on Lafayette street, it's a nice location -- and the just ceased summer rainfall made the evening quite a pleasant event. Again -- I'm hitting nearly the middle of August and I have yet to experience the swelter that I heard so much about. This morning there's even a nice cool breeze coming into my upper floor windows. Anyway -- back to Joe's Pub.

The concert in question was Tanya Donnelly, former lead singer of the band Belly, one time Throwing Muses conspirator, and some kind of relation to Kristin Hersh (whom I've seen a few times in concert). The opening act was Rachel Goswell (I think), who had a lovely foreign accent (British? New Zealand? I'll never know), but was what I like to call a "one note" songwriter. Essentially all of the songs she performed maintained the same tempo and tonalities, in such a way that no one song was distinguishable from any of the others. This, to my mind, is the mark of what separates great songwriters (one of the things, anyway) from capable or mediocre songwriters. If you can mix things up song to song, that shows a range of skill that helps to showcase whatever talent you may have. If you can do this same switch in the middle of one song, even better (and make it work for the song). She was sparsely accompanied by a lone guitarist. And one song featured a concertina, though, the melody played on it was simple and didn't vary either. Kind of emblematic of her performance. Though, to be fair, she had a lush and gorgeous voice and might just need some time to mature as a songwriter. There seem to be (the more music I see) an entire genre of women who fall into this clique -- the "one note songwriter." I'm thinking it's just a young songwriter virus more than something intrinsic about NYC, though.

In any case, Donnelly took the stage and began with a number of songs that I hadn't heard before. Which would've been fine, except the sound board operators at Joe's Pub seemed to lack even the basic awareness of what constitutes a mix. The piano that accompanied her was overwhelmingly loud to the point that you couldn't even make out some of the words that she was singing. The reverb washed over everything. So much so that the monitors were reverbing back to the front stage speakers. Maybe the room was poorly designed acoustically (it certainly was poorly designed for seating and standing purposes), but the mix was atrocious. Part of the set was disturbed by what sounded like a slightly flat guitar (hers, I believe) but she may not have noticed because the mix was of such poor quality. The instrumentation that was used -- guitars, steel pedal guitar (?), kurzweil keyboard, seemed to compound the wavelength of soundwaves instead of separating them out into distinct tones. This is, perhaps, why a simple drum, bass, guitar combo works so well -- each takes on a separate range of tone that doesn't conflict with the other. The steel pedal guitar had the added disadvantage of turning most of the songs into a country & western lilt, which again could've been due to a mediocre mixing job. Some of her songs stand out and keep ringing in your head after the show is over, and her vocal range (take note Rachel Goswell) during the song and between songs is outstanding -- as well as her ability to go from loud to soft, slow to fast, and make it synchronize with the meaning of her lyrics. At the end of her first a capella (save for an overwhelmingly washing reverbed piano) song ended with her own child crying out from the audience toward her, and eliciting a slight smile. At least, I assumed it was her child. If not, some poor mother should be careful what kind of sonic mixing atrocities they expose their offspring to -- they might grow up to mix as poorly as the fellows at the board at Joe's Pub. Hint to future sound board operators everywhere: If it doesn't sound quite right, adding more reverb doesn't automatically make everything better.

Sand in the bull's eye.

2004-08-12T12:50:00.000-03:00

This is the ancient battle of rhetoric, after all. It's an amazingly effective approach to anything. Instead of addressing what is being asked of you, you throw sand in the question and point out something else entirely, thus redirecting the course of discussion.

Take, for instance, the pounding assertion that Kerry doesn't have "strong convictions." Which, is to some extent, what I've heard repeated ad nauseum by the mainstream media. That somehow, someone who is paid $400,000 a year to ostensibly represent a diverse constituency of 300 million individuals ought to have "strong convictions." The only strong conviction that I think someone who is a paid representative of me and the rest of the country I live in shoud be is that he actually listens to the concerns and strong convictions of those that he represents. And then weighs, appropriately, the course of action to take. It's not that this country isn't brimming with thoughtful ideas and public policy matrons who can wonk with the wonkiest out there; rather, it's that we have people who lead with all too strong convictions of what is right and what is wrong and don't have the patience, wherewithal, or true leadership skills to even listen to what else might be out there. Dogmatic inflexibility is not a leadership skill, though it may seem like strong convictions at times, which sounds so much more positive when you listen to it. It's practically mellifluous.

Strong convictions, decisive actions. These are nice traits to have. But I don't see where they've gotten us, except in a whole mess of trouble, in a world that we've created through headstrong actions that haven't been properly thought out. It'd be nice to meet someone who actually listens for a change. And then see what happens when we lead, and the leaders do, in fact, follow.

Welcome to the 20th Century, America...

2004-08-12T12:41:00.000-03:00

Though it seems like it probably will be another example of fabrication and rubber stamping, this welcome sign of international cooperation and, shall we say, "law enforcement" seems to me to be a step in the right direction. I have a few suggestions of where to deploy monitors -- shall we say, oh, Ohio (where the manufacturer of Diebold's voting machines said that he would do what it takes to deliver Ohio to Mr. Bush) and Florida (whose administration's criminal malfeasance in the last election seems to put any other voting shams to shame (are you listening, Chicago?)). I'm sure there are other states that could do well to have some monitoring, too, though it's always hard to figure out where the next electoral fraud will be perpetrated. It is laughable that anyone (as is quoted in the article) could say that we've been holding free elections for over 200 years (yes, free if you were white and male, perhaps). And the flip side being that it seems to smack of "me thinks he doth protest too much," when you complain about having a foreign auditing company (not the military, more like a bunch of accountants) taking notes on your electoral process (as in, "what do we really have to hide?" And apparently, the answer would be, "a lot."). Wouldn't this, rather, be a shining opportunity for America to stand up and show that it does actually hold free elections, as proclaimed by an international monitoring group? But, no, showing ourselves as the shining example of democracy (that we think we are) is still a bit of a stretch for those who might feel this is an intrusion, as opposed to a cultural exchange (which is what it should be...we'll see as to whether it actually transpires that way). My guess -- no. But, hey, I'm cynical.

Highly Anticipated...

2004-08-09T21:32:00.000-03:00

Yes, indeed, it's the highly anticipated "blog about the bike ride to Piermont" blog. Or is that too many blogs? Hmm...anyway, it is true, that on Saturday I undertook a fantastically long bike ride...and sadly, did not finish it due to a minor injury. So, it ended up just being a somewhat long bike ride. I blame my equipment (as any true amateur has a right to) -- a recently installed rear rack to my bicycle which had the added disadvantage of rear weighting my bike so significantly as to induce strain into my lower quadricep muscle. This is perhaps incorrect as a diagnosis, but it's the best I can do on such short notice. In any case, without further ado...Piermont.

The road to Piermont from Brooklyn is quite a distance. It starts with a jaunt across the Brooklyn Bridge, across Chambers Street (bumpy, bumpy....paving seems to be optional in parts of lower Manhattan) to the West Side greenway. Up the west side greenway (quickly, quickly...I do so like the west side greenway's ease of use) all the way to a cross-over ramp/bridge above 181st St. It should be noted that there is one of the shortest, steepest inclines in a greenway before this ramp and it was probably here that I ended up straining my knee, trying to make a mad dash up the hill with an untested rear weight (no, not my ass!). In any case, across the ped/bike bridge, up a hill (another long-ish hill) and then follow the signs to the George Washington bridge bike path. It was quite cool on this particular day (another bad condition for knees, I hear...yes, this is all about my poor knees), but we made it across there...and that's when the road traveling starts in earnest.

9W is one of those deceptive roadways -- kind of like biking on the side of the freeway. Cars zoom by, but seem accustomed to the packs of cyclists that zip on the shoulder as well, so they tend to leave a wide berth. There is a stretch, though, that is under construction and the thought of hitting potholes or uneven pavement and sprawling out in front of a car going 50 did cross my mind, repeatedly. This, thankfully, didn't happen, although I did run into a orange pylon on the return trip (whoops! Sorry NJTransit...). 9W splits onto Sylvan Road which then branches off onto another road (which I can't remember the name of) that features a monstrously long hill and then a not as monstrously long hill. On the return trip, I was forced to run up the taller hill in order to prevent my knees from falling off. Kind of like a triathlon...in any case, be forewarned, it's quite a hill, if you're not used to hills (or, unlucky enough to strain a muscle). I passed through the quaint village of Tenafly and then took Piermont road out of there the whole way to the quaint town of Piermont. There seem to be an abundance of quaint towns.
Before Piermont (which is in NY, while Tenafly is in NJ), there is a small creek bed that runs behind a number of bucolic little cottage-houses. Picturesque, to say the least. I could imagine living in such lovely summer splendor...for about five minutes, before the sheer boredom and overwhelming upkeep on the house (not to mention the chance of eternal flooding) would send me screaming for the hills. Or some city with a good levee.

Piermont has a number of nice little shops, but sadly (for some odd reason) this particular August Saturday was freezing! So, I remained outside, trying to remain warm and had a yogurt and granola with my riding partner. And then, it was back on the bike and struggling to make it all the way home without causing irreparable harm. Unfortunately, I was only able to make it to 72nd Street before common sense kicked in and I hopped on a subway train (I love that you can take your bike on the subway here...) and made it home. I believe Piermont is 10 or 15 miles over the border and approximately 30 from Brooklyn. My measurements are always a little awry, so maybe it's only 7 miles over the border, and 15 round trip. In any case, it's not that far, and I hope to heal up and be in healthy enough shape to revisit it. Perhaps on a warmer day.

Because honesty blows chunks...

2004-08-08T12:33:00.000-03:00

This just in...in case you were wondering why all of your dates were ending early...

Things they don't teach in film school.

2004-08-07T20:08:00.000-03:00

An entrepeneurial spirit joins the long list of hoax perpetrators in the annals of history. Sadly, he didn't make it through/to film school or he might have had that class that tells you posting hoax videos of beheadings on the internet might cause the FBI to show up on your doorstep.

The real kicker in the story is the last line.

Take Away the Vote!

2004-08-07T00:25:00.000-03:00

This, from an article about a recent poll on whether John Kerry would be a better president based on security issues comes a gem of a quote:

"I don't think Kerry's ready to be president," said Laura Weber, a 37-year-old Republican from Pierre, S.D. "Bush would be more decisive."

Yes, Laura Weber, because being decisive is important in your president. Especially when he makes those decisions dogmatically, quickly, with inaccurate information (or none at all) and those decisions are all wrong!. Far be it that your president might actually consider an issue, investigate it, and debate the merits of his decision before making up his mind and acting on it.

I would make some comment about how I think it'd be great if they repealed the vote for some people or something, but hey, if we get Laura Weber's wish, they will! Don't think that "disenfranchisement" is a central plank to the Republican party's platform? How else can you rule the world, if not through a military dictatorship?

Voting can be so pesky sometimes. Especially when those uppity non-white folks in Florida exercise their 15th Amendment rights.

Which I guess gives me the thread that we really do get the leaders we deserve. The stupid ones, apparently, is what "we" deserve.

Finally, the truth from the administration

2004-08-05T21:49:00.000-03:00

Seems like it only happens during a "misspeaking engagement."

Just lovely.

PEN pals

2004-08-05T01:28:00.000-03:00

I had the great fortune of being able to sneak into a special reading by some of the literary world's luminaries tonight at the PEN "State of Emergency" seminar. Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Francine Prose, and many others added their voices to other author's works (Ariel Dorfman reading Cervantes in both Spanish and English, A.M. Homes reciting Ferlinghetti, for instance). Each piece was meant to be related to the removal of rights that have occurred thanks in large part to the Patriot Act, in their campaign to amend it.

Amend it? How about repeal the damn thing! I mean -- really, as Rushdie eloquently put it at the beginning of the evening, "how we deal with fighting the terrorist threat will probably be the defining battle of (this) civilization. Will we become our enemy?" Many more eloquent moments, brought forth from quotes from suffragette before her time Susan B. Anthony (via Barbara Goldsmith), as well as a rendition on imperial tendencies (Mark Twain via Russell Banks) and the use of bully journalism (the bible of America, as he wrote). Eve Ensler pounding the microphone with her pulpit delivery reading from Egyptian novelist Nawal El-Sadaawi (whose name I'm sure I've badly butchered, thanks) whose words rang as true now as ever. The grim estimations of Henry David Thoreau on the nature of unjustice (via Paul Auster's equally grim delivery) which also rang contemporary. Overall, the impression based on the excerpts chosen to my mind was that what we are going through is a horrible thing -- but it is not unprecedented. In fact, it is not even unexpected in some sense. America has long been a country of indelible injustices, stretches of imperialistic fervor, and occasionally we do the right thing, though often too late or too little. The readings of this evening drilled home that cyclical nature of our country, perhaps for better or for worse. I may not live to see this one unravel itself properly, but freedom is always a fragile cracked piece of ceramic, and will always need to be glued back together and treated carefully if you hope to enjoy its presence at your tea time the next year. By ignoring it, we -- as a society -- will insure its eventual fall and shattering.

The evening also featured one of the more surreal readings -- a "poem" crafted like mosaic from GWB's actual words (as arranged and orchestrated by Jonathan Safran Foer) which began with some hilarious verbal hiccoughs, but lost a little bit of its steam as Safran Foer took so much poetic license as to create concrete sentences from collaging various phrases into whatever he felt the need to say, instead of just letting the absurdity of what Bush had said stand on its own ludicrously poetic merit. The biggest laughs came not from the decontextualized parts of his poetic collage, but rather from the verbatim, in context comments. Which should teach anyone that the truth is far more powerful, strange, and hilarious, than any didactic fiction.

Overall, a fairly amazing evening, and another reason why I am glad to live in New York City.

At last, the hype

2004-08-04T15:36:00.000-03:00

Okay, so I finally broke down and took in F-9/11, Michael Moore's latest opus du jour. And, unless you've been trapped underneath a television running the Fox News Channel, you undoubtedly know what this is all about. From a strictly "documentary" perspective, though, it fell very short. Clearly, trying to organize a project of this magnitude -- and a constantly moving target (documenting "history" as it happens is a notoriously slippery object), created some problems. The most powerful moments came with footage hardly seen of wartime mutilation (horrifying to witness -- if this were broadcast consistently on television news, would we be able to sit through dinner and watch the evening news? Doubtful...) and most strongly with his Flint, MI, mother of a son in Iraq. These moments were the most eloquent and real and felt akin to the final act of Bowling for Columbine -- in fact, it seems like most of Moore's movies follow a similar coda, with the tilting toward a windmill in order to create some semblance of solace in the face of something simply awful (destruction of his hometown's economy, gun violence, the illegitimate reign of George II...). Yes, it does make one mad to be faced with all of the overwhelming (and already known) evidence that paints the current faux-administration as nothing more than history's most craven war profiteers, slaves to a petrochemical master ensconced in the middle east. Though, the link in F-9/11 is never made strongly enough or conclusively, possibly because that link is kept very, very well-guarded. The hearsay and conjecture surrounding it, though, would be almost enough to convict in front of a jury of peers. One might be hopeful that jury might show up this November. I'm skeptical, though quite certain that Teresa Heinz-Kerry (bless her, she'll give the wags at the conservative rags something to harp on for the next several months) summation of 4 more years of this (as "hell") is an understatement of the millenia. Hell will look like a vacation compared to another 4 years of endless fear tactics (that are arguably patently laughable) and slash and burn economic and environmental approaches to this country and the world.

Despite F-9/11's shortcomings, cinematically, it still managed to pull off some very moving moments. Though, it definitely was hamstrung a bit by Moore's tendency to caricature and beat over the head with a hammer his overall point. The most irritating, perhaps, was his returning to a certain shot of GWB looking perplexed in a Florida classroom on 9/11, covered by Moore's heavily sarcastic voiceover questioning what Bush might be thinking. I feel there must have been a more potent way to work this together coherently. And my hat is off to the researchers/archival producers who worked on the project -- they did an amazing job culling through the available footage (and securing the rights to it) to create an incredible portrait of one of the most disturbing periods in American history. I'm so glad that I get to say I lived through it. So far. The year isn't over yet.

If it's Monday, it must be al-Queda...

2004-08-02T11:07:00.000-03:00

There are innumerable reports about an alleged terror threat to carry out car bombing in the East Coast...soon. Or sometime soon. This "alarming" intelligence comes straight from the al-Queda coffe klatch in Pakistan, apparently, and has Tom Ridge in a dither, to be sure. I thought he was resigning? (Hell, if I had his job, I'd resign -- I get to run around like Chicken Little while all of the funding that is rightfully mine, is being spent to half-ass our way through a country that simply wasn't a threat EVER? Sign me up!)

In any case, I'm a little skeptical of the veracity of any information that might leak out of Pakistan. Not that I don't doubt that there are a bajillion al-Queda operatives wandering free and clear in this lovely neck of the world. However, knowing a smidgen of how "terrorists cells" operate doesn't give a whole lot of credence to this information. If one were to study the resistance of any war -- WWII, for instance -- and choose to use those models as an example of what al-Queda emulates, it would make sense that any of that information would be thoroughly bogus, because one arm of the cell wouldn't know what the other one is doing. That's the way the cells stay safely operating. It's a very clear approach to "resistance" (I do loathe to use this word in relation to a-Q, but the parallels are the strongest in terms of understanding tactical approaches). In fact, it would make complete and utter sense to have a bevy of incorrect and, in fact, highly detailed fake information at the disposal of some members of a cell in order to sew chaos, fear, and panic as well as divert attention from the real and actual targets. Does it strike anyone as odd to not question the messenger in this regard? In journalistic parlance, "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." But, as journalism is now becoming a lost and forgotten art form (akin to underwater basket weaving or some such), actually verifying sources is de classe. In this case, verifying highly anonymous sources who may be close to people who want nothing more than to make you get panicky and do something stupid while misdirecting you in every possible way...makes for not very reliable (even if highly repeated, as these "threats" seem to be) information. Color me unimpressed, I suppose.

The only way to truly break the cell up, is to infiltrate the exact cell that you're working on finding...i.e. the cell that might be operating in Paterson, New Jersey, for instance. Isn't that where most of the 9/11 guys happened to be hanging out? Might it not be reasonable to assume that Paterson still holds a few leftovers, hangers on, or god forbid, a whole different cell operating concurrently but disconnectedly to the 9/11 group? And once infiltrating, being able to extract information from that cell alone, to shut it down. This is, unfortunately, a systemic approach, and very time and labor intensive (two things we're not particularly fond of here, I think). If all of the billions of dollars that we were pissing away in Iraq were to be redirected appropriately, however, I'm fully confident that this slow and treacherous cell extinction process could occur. But, we pissed that away, right and proper because if we actually were in a safe and comfortable place, why would we need GWB?

All of this screed, of course, probably puts me on the top 10 list of people most likely to get raided by some random illegitimate arm of the justice department. I guess for once I'd like to see common sense win out over fear, hysteria, and insecurity. Just once. Maybe next life.

(The weird thing is -- this is a win-win situation for those in power: if they predict it and nothing happens, they can say, "Oh, we were just doing our jobs well." If they predict it and something happens, they can say, "Oh, see, we were right, but we weren't given enough resources and martial law to enact the kind of security we thought you should have." Sigh.)

Head of State

2004-08-01T21:47:00.000-03:00

Reading The Economist is always good for some thought provocation -- they're stridently pro-current administration slant ends up giving a pretty fair estimation of the way of the vast and varied US of Aigh. In reviewing Kerry's campaign, they continue to drive home the point that he has no platform, save for the obvious, "I'm not GWB." That in and of itself is pretty compelling stuff for most sane individuals. Sadly, we don't live in a sane country. Any place that considers a strip mall to be cultural has some reality issues.

For the record, I wish someone in the Democratic party HQ would pop in a copy of "Head of State." Granted, this isn't Chris Rock at his most incisively brutal and hilarious. Rock, for the most part, plays it very close to the vest and safe with his material. But his "That ain't right" mantra during a somewhat impromptu speech in the middle of the movie is something that anyone campaigning against an incumbent might do well to think about. At least emulating it for a smidgen of a germ. Because so much of this country just ain't right. And a lot of those ain'ts exist because of collapsing, foolish, backwards policies generated by an administration that still thinks it's 1980 (when most of the think-tank rejects in the administration were theoretically in their prime).

Anyway, that ain't right. I would only hope that Kerry (or Edwards or somebody) might find a mantra that catches hold as cleverly as that. American's like jingles (much more so than actually trying to comprehend difficult public policy decisions). Maybe a jingle would be the way to go.

Satin Island

2004-07-31T17:35:00.000-03:00

Or rather Staten Island. Damn. I should've taken my camera -- the view of the Statue of Liberty from the ferry. Ellis Island. The funky waterfront baseball stadium. Cozy homes on suburban streets. Perkins Family restaurants (didn't know they made it out this far east). Willowbrook Park's tame ducks and geese -- you could almost reach down and pick 'em up. The carousel therein that opened its motorized shutters in time to reveal itself. Bagel Time convenience store. The wildlife refuge on Travis Road that isn't open on the weekends (what's the point of that?). I ran through a nice cloud of gnats, too. The Staten Island mall, in all its standardized 1980s americana glory -- chain store after chain store secluded along a rapid near-highway. Long stretches of nondescript road that led to Blue Heron Pond park -- a lovely little oasis of greenery on the Island. No herons, though, today. Some dragonflies. Back along Hylan avenue (until it turned into a hellish, pothole ridden strip mall). Right turn onto some random street that opened up into the classically named "New Dorp High School" (not New Dork, as I'm sure they are constantly called). New Dorp High School has -- I'm quite sure -- the largest soccer field in the greater New York City area. It looks like you could fit 20 or 30 simultaneous soccer games on the single field. This nice field turns into a recreation area, which turns into a boardwalk on one of the most uninhabited beaches (today was in the upper 80s, and humid, and a handful of people were hanging around in beach chairs). Further down the boardwalk, more people were clustered, though, so at least some people make it out on a hot day. From the boardwalk, down to Bay St. and back to the Ferry terminal. Altogether a good outing. But the jury's still out on Staten Island.

New Employment opportunities for retired superheroes

2004-07-30T22:42:00.000-03:00

I find it reassuring to know that even when you're done with a good run of your exploits on television, there's still a chance to retrain and find your calling at an educational school, as I do so hope one particular vampire slayer has done -- as evidenced by this calendar entry.

Pay particular note to September 24th.

Coming tomorrow: The wilds of Staten Island -- revealed!

I know. Hard to believe that they'll even let me post it, it's so controversial.

Florida -- Third World country or just bane of our existence?

2004-07-28T13:34:00.000-03:00

From a report on lost elections information via touchscreen computer crashes, comes this gem:

In December, officials began backing up the data daily, to help avoid similar data wipeouts in the future, said Seth Kaplan, spokesman for the county's elections supervisor, Constance Kaplan.

Two issues:

1. They started backing up the data a month after getting it?
2. Oh my god, you're having an election in Florida?! Why do we insist on trying this!? It doesn't work. Florida should just do old fashioned hay bale chicken fights (two contestants sit on the shoulders of one another and throw hay bales at each other -- aka, a "straw vote" (okay, so I got that from an Asterix & Obelix book...) -- it would be infinitely more fair and entertaining.

And I'll admit I'm curious as to the similarity in last name between the "spokesman" and the "elections supervisor." It makes it sound like they called her at home and her husband fielded the call. But I can't confirm or deny that rumor.

Wishing I had a camera

2004-07-28T12:01:00.000-03:00

I happened upon a truck idling outside a deli on my way back from the park today. On the side it said in large type, "Flushing Meats." Now, of course, this is the name of a food purveyor presumably located in Flushing, NY. However, in the days of Soylent Green or Delicatessen, someone might be convinced that this was a specialty sausage eradication service. Or some kind of plumber. Still, wish I had a camera to get that one. Ah well.

Recipe #2

2004-07-27T22:14:00.000-03:00

Wow, all the way up to my second recipe. How exciting.

Okay, this is something that I discovered as I opened up my vegetable drawer and found two lonesome red beets. They weren't the hard as a rock kind of beets that I'm used to dealing with (and roasting to great effect), but rather, they had been hiding out in the back of the drawer for a week or two and had developed a bit of softness. This, I suppose, is the key. They were as soft as some potatoes I found lurking in there as well. Add an onion, some pepper, coriander or whatever other spices you'd like (a little rosemary might've been interesting) and you're on your way to making what I'd like to call "Bloody Hash Browns." Basically, chop the beet into smallish chunks and follow by cutting up 2 potatoes of roughly equivalent size to match. Add half the onion (or a whole small one), diced slightly finer than the potatoes. Put a tablespoon of canola or olive oil in a pan and set it to high. Throw in the beets. Add the potatoes. Toss in the onion. Stir to keep from sticking too much. Cover. Stir every 2 or 3 minutes to keep the oil circulated and the various parts of it "browning" properly. Takes about 10 minutes. Add the seasonings and that's about it. The beets add a nice earthy taste to the sweetness of the onion and the relative flavorlessness of the potato. And all of the pieces get that lovely blood red hue from the beet as it meshes with everything, so it looks, well, bloody.

Okay, so it's not haute cuisine. But it could serve as a nice base to put a piece of fish on or something else. I dunno. Go wild. Or ignore this recipe. I can't always have a great cycling adventure -- it was raining like crazy tonight.

The Manchurian Candidate?

2004-07-27T11:41:00.000-03:00

I've mostly been giving this movie (and its related hype) a giant miss -- simply because I've seen the original, which is fantastic and still -- today -- holds up almost too well. But, in reading a brief synopsis on a website, I was struck by how completely misnamed the remake is. They've updated the action to the Iraq/Kuwaiti War, it seems...which would make it strange to consider the victim of a brainwashing in the middle east to be a "manchurian" candidate. American geography is woeful enough as is -- and wouldn't it have saved some of the obvious jabs from naysayers to completely update it, name and all and call it something like the Arabian Candidate? Or Kuwaiti Candidate? I guess I'm just splitting hairs, but that's what I do sometimes. It also mentioned that the Liev Schreiber character was "campaigning" to be a VP candidate...last I checked, no one campaigns to be a Vice-President. I'm betting it's a misinterpretation via synopsis. I hate when that happens.

Manhattan Bridge Remixed

2004-07-27T00:11:00.000-03:00

I had the opportunity to cross the Manhattan Bridge tonight...and wow, is the new segment amazing! They opened the opposite side to bike-only traffic. It's complete with streetlights, freshly paved and has an easier on and off ramp (either side). I gotta hand it to whomever put that into motion. It's far and away my favorite bridge now. Though, the view from the opposite side isn't nearly as nice.

Found in Translation

2004-07-26T23:59:00.000-03:00

I was biking home and saw, for the first time, an ad for Suntory scotch. You may remember (if you saw the movie) that this was the product that Bill Murray was pimping in Lost in Translation. Did the product exist before? Did some perceptive exec at Suntory decide that they had a million dollar commercial running in America non-stop for several months and it was time to parlay that exposure into some cash? Probably. Or is Sofia Coppola just a shill beneath all of the longing glances and ennui?

You make the call...

TV time

2004-07-18T14:04:00.000-03:00

I don't watch television very often, but I had the chance on the airplane to catch a bit of the Tour de France...and I have to say...oh my god! What the hell are all of those spectators doing? That's insane! It's hard enough to ride up the mountains at the rate that those guys are doing it, but to have some insane person carrying a 7' flag and wearing a pair of antlers on his head running right next to you...that's not a spectator, it's a freaking landmine! Do people practice for the Tour by riding in rush hour midtown traffic? They ought to! Or flying at 40mph through Chinatown at noon. That would work, too.

Anyway, very impressive that no one was felled by all the well-wishers or attention-seekers or whatever the hell they were.

red sky at night

2004-07-17T11:07:00.000-03:00

I haven't been taking many pictures lately. Which has definitely gotten me to a pondering sort of mode. I wonder whether it goes in cycles -- the feeling or need to acquire images. Maybe, when your brain is feeling like it can't remember anything, it compensates with the requisite need for documentation. I know that this is poppycock, of course, because I find that it mostly ends up being an energy distribution issue. When I have lots more time and energy, I find taking pictures to be thoroughly possible. This has been a particularly hard energy time, what with the myriad of deadlines that seem to have cropped up in my world. If I knew they were all going to come during the same 2 months, I would've hibernated much more efficiently earlier. Ah well.

And the downside to biking -- maintenance. If anyone knows a good bike repair class, I am in desperate need of good skill and knowledge. A bike co-op would be a thing of beauty. Maybe that's an "only in San Francisco" arrangement. I changed a flat on my bike and replaced my tire as well and seemed to manage to do it correctly...except that now my bike makes a weird metal-flexing noise. My lack of trust in my own fix-it skill has kept me off my bike for 3 days now, for fear of having my front hub explode and shoot in all directions whilst pitching me headlong into a central nervous trauma ward. I suppose that may be a little dramatic (tuck and roll, screams the inner voices, tuck and roll), but it is definitely a legitimate fear. I will be longer off a bike, too, as I head to the sunny shores of California for an extended remix of days gone by. I will, I feel, miss New York, but moreover, I will miss having a semblance of continuity to my life. I have yet to experience this "settled in" feeling that I had been hearing so much about. I don't think I've made an entire month (or contiguous 4 weeks) without traveling somewhere. How do business travelers do it? It's near driving me to distraction. Or at least small apoplectic conniptions, like tremors or something.

I think I will have all of August to myself, though. And judging from what I've heard, I might have all of NYC all to myself for August, too. Just me and the skeeters.

pink lightning

2004-07-15T00:08:00.000-03:00

I do like summer thunderstorms. Yesterday, I rode through a nice NY drizzle in Prospect Park and decided I like that, too. I think growing up in a city that had its fair share of summer/fall thunderstorms and gushing rivulets of draining water dotting the landscape definitely predisposed me to feeling somewhat nostalgic for all of the downpouring that has been transpiring over the past few days. People told me before I moved here that the weather in NY was terrible. Not terrible, Chicago terrible, but terrible, not as good as SF terrible. So far, they have been proven to be prejudiced by their own view of what makes for good weather and what doesn't. I know, I know... there is still August. Looming, like a swear word, over it all. I have heard that August sends men screaming to their deaths. So far, June and July have been rather nice -- June, in fact, was deliriously gorgeous for the most part. I had no idea. I know from previous experiences that September and October have some definite highlights, too. This August thing, though. Well, it's definitely like waiting for a blockbuster sequel to arrive.

Speaking of: Spiderman 2 -- good sequel, as sequels go. And a halfway decent comic book movie, though definitely more on the chin scratching introspective side of things than on the out of control action side of things. It reminded me, strangely, of the curious turn of events diagrammed in Superman 2, wherein Superman decides that he needs to become normal for Lois Lane. I don't know the Spiderman comic book storyline well-enough to know if this thread was pilfered so directly or if -- maybe -- this is just a phase that all superheroes go through. Heck, I even contemplated giving up my superpowers for the love of a good woman. If only I could find one. Or get superpowers to start with. I have a feeling if I were gifted with them, they'd be totally useless ones, like being able to color coordinate or transmogrify metals into Spam or something.

And I read the most amusing thing on someone else's blog the other day -- maybe I'll find the URL again...but, it essentially visually compared Dick Cheney to Dr. Bunson Honeydew (of the Muppet Show)...and they do look surprisingly similar. It might explain a lot of things...like, how GWB looks very similar to Beaker...though, if he spoke like Beaker, I think the world would be in a far better state of things. Pity. Beaker/Honeydew for Prez ticket might be worth something. Hell, all they ever did was blow up Beaker. And Muppets have outstanding regenerative powers. Maybe GWB has confused actual people with Muppets. It wouldn't surprise me -- I think the grasp one has on reality slips in direct relationship to how long one sits in the oval office. There's something about the negative ionization field that the Lectroids from Planet Ten created over it...

Queens?

2004-07-11T21:22:00.000-03:00

Yes, Queens. This weekend featured a rollicking bike tour of some of the lesser seen parts of the boroughs -- a jaunt through parts of Brooklyn, such as East Williamsburg (bumpy roads) and Bushwick (really bumpy roads). Featuring a bit of a trip underneath the overhead rail structure above Myrtle avenue. It reminded me a lot of parts of the Mission in San Francisco...if the Mission were covered by a metal canopy and seemed like a tight, claustrophobic closet. Still, wandering about through parts of Bushwick, I had to wonder if this was where people once were thinking that gentrification would be heading I'm thinking that may be the case, but certainly not in the next few years -- neighborhood folks can feel safe in that regard, though, I'm not sure if a little gentrification might not be a bad thing. On this sociological phenomenon, I'm resolutely torn. I understand the need for keeping neighborhoods intact, but adding some needed services (like, say, a grocery store) in some of the outlying streets might not be a bad thing. I'd be happy to hear arguments pro or con in that arena as I'm sure that would make for a lovely and lively discussion.

This particular part of Brooklyn (un-gentrified) abuts the very suburban section of Queens called "Glendale." I'll assume that this is Queens, though, it may also be Brooklyn. The crease in my well-worn map makes it hard to distinguish at times. The stark contrast between the areas is...well, stark. Tree lined streets, perfectly paved roads, steak houses and people wandering the streets with their kids manifest this nestled neighborhood tucked against Forest Park and a cemetery. When people hear Queens, they probably have thoughts of the freeways and desolate dilapidated industry of Long Island City. I've found the other side -- a veritable New Jersey-ian suburb tacked on in complete glory, almost in the geographic center of the borough. Swirling about Forest Park (possibly the most underrated park, perhaps unheard of park? in the city) which features a golf course, greenway (well-paved) and roads that are closed off on weekends, as well as trails, wooded areas, picnicking sections, and even horse trails, this part of Queens indeed surprises. I found myself marveling -- once again -- at the sheer versimilitude of New York City, as it turns from gritty urban blight landscape to everywhere suburbiatown in the blink of a ten minute bike ride. Traversing the opposite end of Forest Park is Kew Gardens, another tony suburb stand-in. Big houses, big lawns, what appears to be the start of a freeway all remind me of sections of West Los Angeles. It's even a bit hilly, as if in a topographical nod to the left coast.

Flowing north from Kew Gardens, is the expansive Flushing Meadows/Corona Park section. This is the area of the legendary USTA pavillion, Shea Stadium, and most notably those little balsa wood-like flying saucers of the old World's Fair structures. I didn't get to explore it too thoroughly, but it's as creepy and leftover futuristic up close as it felt like it was in Men In Black. Additionally, there's a botanical garden in there somewhere, an art museum, and a lot of parkland space for soccer and such. I raced a heron as it glided above a creek. I also managed to get up to the Flushing Bay promenade for a gander at LaGuardia. This is, by far, the smelliest bay in NY that I've encountered. Toxic run-off from the airport, no doubt, does not bode well for any sort of natural preservation.

Swooping back through Queens took me through Jackson Heights (nice paved bike lane, lots of condos and co-ops apparently for sale) and a glimpse at a game of cricket being played on a concrete playground. Again, diversity and New York City seem to run together, particularly when it comes to recreational activities (I spotted a bagpiper earlier in Forest Park). Jackson Heights descends through Woodside (reminiscent of Ravenswood, Chicago area), Sunnyside and back into Long Island City (industrial, industrial, industrial). And back across the Pulaski Bridge into Brooklyn, Greenpoint, Williamsburg(h), Fort Greene, and back home. An enjoyable trip, and another step closer to experiencing the whole of New York before my eyes.

Stupid Bumper Stickers

2004-07-07T13:35:00.000-03:00

This will no doubt enrage certain people, but it's my damn blog. So pfft.

I'm sure there are more dumb ones than clever ones out there -- bumper stickers. Yesterday on a bike ride through various parts of Brooklyn (which I would be unable to name, exactly), I followed behind a car that said in bumper sticker format: "The Bible says the Jews own Israel." Now, it seemed to me to be indicative of the level of insane discourse that some 2000+ years past it's possible first incarnation, people still live their lives (create their views) based on...words in a book. What I wouldn't give to go back in time and mistranslate the first edition of this particular froth inducing, crusade fomenting, inquisition inspiring tome and somehow work the eternal worshipping of tapioca pudding and spatulas whilst wearing colanders on one's head into the edition. It might liven up the discussion a bit. And add some levity to the process. Though, then, I suppose everyone would have serious conversations about what exactly the significance of the tapioca is and why not banana pudding with nilla wafers? Why not??

I guess my point was that it's just a bunch of words. And words ain't what they're all cracked up to be. Seems like it might be a useful exercise to use something besides someone else's words (whether you believe them to be god's, dog's, or a talking pog's) to justify your position in the world. There, I said it. Okay, now I can safely go to hell. Good thing in my rewrite, hell is filled with longish, happy, pretty bicycle trails, and plenty of yummy smoothies at the end of the trail. And dancing penguins. There's always a dancing penguin in hell.

Go home

2004-07-07T13:26:00.000-03:00

I went back to my "growing up" place over the past weekend and came to the distinct realization that it is technically impossible to return home. Not physically, so much as the wake of memory always will come in stark contrast with the rippling water of the current day. Firstly, memories are always fragments, shards of a distortionary mirror. This means that, though I'm fairly certain that I indeed did go to that birthday party in that large looming apartment building on the hill next to the tunnel, my recollection of it is foggy at best and distorted at worst. And I also experienced the further effect of that distortion over time, by reliving a series of memory chunks at the time when I would pass semi-familiar locales. These are not ordered linearly or even ordered at all. But the memories that did manage to surface were all very crystalline in recollection. Often times, the memory was only a millisecond or two (like the birthday party in the larger building) or longer, like sitting on a porch talking with a friend. Though, mostly the images remain much more cemented and easier to recall. I wonder if sound is harder to recall than image? I imagine that there are studies about this somewhere.

I also realized that I was very glad to leave the home city. It never felt like a fit to me and in returning, I had this imprint further reinforced. Though, I do miss the quirky, odd, safe haven of my childhood home. It was a tan stucco ex-barn building nestled off and inaccessible from the street in the middle of the city. I have never seen a home quite like it and may never see it again.

Trifecta

2004-07-02T13:20:00.000-03:00

As is the case with these things, Marlon Brando completed the trio of famous people deaths today. He was 80 and didn't cause the homeless crisis or bring supply side voodoo economics to the world. Instead, he made countless important and dramatic movies. And didn't get upstaged by a monkey named Bonzo.

A moment of silence. Or, just watch On the Waterfront again, in memoriam.

------

Oh, and I hear that the FBI thinks we should be aware of a possible terrorist attack on the fourth of July. If you can discern the difference between it and the other fireworks going off, of course. Why does it strike me as odd that we celebrate our "freedom" by blowing up things, when we seem to be most on edge of things blowing up?

Have an ironic 4th of July!

The Manhattan Bridge

2004-07-01T19:07:00.000-03:00

For some odd reason, NYCDOT or whatever organization is responsible for such things, decided that a wrought iron fence was the perfect beautification piece to add to the sidewalk around the Manhattan Bridge. Sure, it looks all right, but it makes actually getting to the Manhattan Bridge bike lane an arduous process of crossing traffic, dodging right hand turning cars and banking 90 degrees to hit a sidewalk ramp. Instead of just waiting for a hole to open up in the traffic pattern and then going for it.

Additionally, they saw fit to remove the "bike ramp" addition that used to adorn the set of stairs that led up to the Manhattan Bridge bike lane. I remarked on several occasions that I seemed to be the only person using it, and mostly out of novelty's sake, rather than any practicality of it. So, needless to say I was beginning to wonder if the Manhattan Bridge bike/pedestrian lanes days were numbered. This misgiving was not dissuaded in any way by the number of scissor lifts (4) that were rolling around, hoisting workmen in the air to hang protective cloths on the edge of the fence that separates the pedestrian lanes from the subway. These fine fellows had the added experience of nearly disemboweling one another while trying to maneuver the scissor lift through a rather tight corner. Fortunately (at the time of squeezing by), no one was maimed. Though, I'm not certain how long that condition might last.

I just wanted to note for the record that I firmly believe that the Manhattan Bridge is one of the finest biking bridges in New York. It covers a smaller stretch (seemingly) of the East River, thus making it a quicker trek. It is almost imperceptibly trafficked -- few pedestrians and cyclists competing for a smaller footprint of space. And it ends in Brooklyn two blocks shy of the Brooklyn Bridge on/off ramp, which makes it almost the same starting point (ending point?). And if you're heading up the east side, it's definitely the way to go. A quick jaunt down Bowery to Allen and then you're on First. Or you can sneak down to the greenway to take a more leisurely and pleasant route. Plus, the view isn't half bad, though I think there are other bridges with better views.

In any case, I would be quite saddened to learn that this thoroughfare might be closed in the future -- that was what it seemed like the workers might've been preparing to unleash. I might have to learn to build a raft and float across.

More bad analogies

2004-06-29T19:09:00.000-03:00

I'm standing up at Riverside Drive and 110th/Cathedral Parkway. The sun is filtering through the leafy trees, dappling the sidewalk. It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, as someone might say. Granted, it's not my neighborhood. But it might as well be. Bank Street School of (for?) Education sits around the corner. I walk to meet my friend there and a woman holding her child's hand stops another on the street. The single woman, bright shock of orange hair, stops, smiles and begins talking with the child who at first asks a question and now darts his head hither and yon looking at an imaginary moth flittering about. On the street corner, Kerry supporters are lobbying residents to work to beat Bush. I politely decline to help, not for lack of enthusiasm for the task, but for a set of previous commitments which have endeavored to envelop the rest of my time.

Darting up Sixth Avenue, chasing taxis and sprinting the length of Central Park on my bike, I am continually in awe of the city that I now call home. I understand how people can fall for a city, or an idea -- traipsing into love, I suppose. The sidewalk cafes, the preponderance of people, sheer masses that seem to somehow avoid being hit by my bicycle as effortlessly as I am able to navigate through the clumps of them. Even the drivers who seem oblivious to the bike paths, or the pedestrians who wander out in a death defying stumbling path -- I feel a warmth for them, too. This is the lifeblood of this city, the heart that pumps out the populace and the city streets like capillaries carrying each plasma-like person. Oh, but the analogy goes so far astray here. Regardless, it is easy to fall in love with a place, when it is golden lit by sun glinting skies and the grimy, gritty air still feels like a pumice cleanse.

Tejas

2004-06-28T13:19:00.000-03:00

I just returned from College Station, TX, and was surprised by a number of things.

1. There was a protest (granted a handful of people with signs) about the war in Iraq. They weren't arrested or even treated to a barrage of tear gas and billy clubs.
2. It is exceedingly green (the color of foliage, anyway) there. I had the mistaken impression that Texas was mostly arid desert and rolling tumbleweeds and dried up oil fields. Nope. Acres of lush green trees and ivy and rolling meadows. This is southeastern Texas, anyway.
3. It rains all of the time in College Station. And you get to sleep with the crickets in your room if you stay at the Howard Johnson's. My recommendation: don't stay there.
4. Texas A&M has the largest (area wise) campus in the country.

There were, undoubtedly other things, too, but I'm just glad to be back in NYC.

A Poem Before Leaving To The Arid Texan Plain

2004-06-23T23:22:00.000-03:00

Mosquitoes.
marauding my room
nocturnal savage thirst
they have
my arm to thank
for happy times
insomniacal inebriation
dizzy with the lovely taste
of my body, my blood
and all that I know
is the dull itch
left behind

inhabitable

2004-06-22T12:54:00.000-03:00

Things to notice, on this, a Tuesday:

1. 2 out of 3 NYC parks employees may indeed slumber in the back and passenger side of a park truck, resting at an obscure, non-parkish intersection in Prospect Heights.

2. If one were to play a game of "punch buggy" but instead of using antiquated Volkswagens were to use baby strollers, one would get into a knock down drag out brawl if they were to stand at the corner of Carroll and Court. I think I counted 5 at once.

3. Rain drops do come in varying sizes.

And onto the question that I brought up with a friend last night -- do you think that this planet will be inhabitable in 10 years? 20? 50? These are all legitimately years that could possibly fall within my lifetime. I am seeing more and more realistically the possibility that this planet will not be inhabitable to humans within that range. I think this is reversible. But I don't think it will be if we don't actually take real and forceful action as nations in the service of that in the next 5 years. I'm sure I'm not the only person to think this.

Neurologically Damaged

2004-06-20T20:49:00.000-03:00

I've noticed that more and more people are walking around the city with one arm crooked at an angle with their hand at their ear. This is, of course, from the incessant talking on cell phones (and yes, I am occasionally guilty of this phenomena, sadly) and I imagine that in several years, if we don't learn about the radiation damage done by this, we will see a radical increase in the number of chiropractic treatments required for people who will be labelled as having "cell phone elbow." I wonder if the trend is already starting. Cell Phone Elbow (CPE) I'm sure will be less detrimental than the upcoming Cell Phone Ear disorder...

paean to ny

2004-06-20T18:41:00.000-03:00

New York is like a cesspool. Now, before I get barraged with a various assortment of appropriately scented hate mail, please let me explain. I've continually made comment about the quality of various greenways and other sorts of contrivances that line this rough hewn metropolis, but it is clear to me that it's not a particularly habitable locale. Not in the sense that a place like San Francisco might be considered -- temperate climate, topography that shows off a view from nearly every street corner, natural physical beauty around each and every corner. New York doesn't have any of that physical nature. It probably was a terrific bog of flat land at one point in time. But, it has what San Francisco may never have, and something that only a city raised by Dutch settlers might manage -- a sculpted character. It seems to me that only the legacy of the mental attitude of the Dutch, a country that legitimately staves itself off from certain doom strictly through engineering ingenuity and a fair amount of willpower, could bear the fruit that has made the cesspool that is New York City so unbelievably amazing.

I biked up through Brooklyn to Queens and took a tour of the Socrates Sculpture garden. Today, a free tai chi class was busy building up their...umm..chi or chi-chi or whatever it is tai chi does. And it was a bit like watching fast moving butoh (or slow moving ballet class). Mixed among the various dog walkers (or yellers) and strollers, were a number of intriguing sculptures. All of this on a hunk of land that juts out slightly toward the east river and seems littered with the refuse of the industrial age. From there, it was on to the Triborough Bridge, which links up to Randall's Island/Ward's Island (though I'm unsure of the distinction between one or the other), a place that I'd be willing to wager most New Yorker's never see (unless they play soccer or baseball or belong in a mental institution...or rather, are in a mental institution). Cirque du Soleil is apparently cordoned off here, as well (very close to the mental institution), which I hadn't realized. But, good to know. A pedestrian bridge links Ward's Island with the upper east side (presumably to allow for a quick transfer of potential patients?).

In any case, it struck me that a less vigorous and determined population would've just not bothered. But New York and those that have shaped the city into what it is today, do. They bother. They ask questions, they think, they act. Yeah, there's a lot of talk here, but there's also an awful lot of action. The greenways and bike paths are a good example (as I have taken fine advantage of them over the past few weeks). They are carved out of bits of sidewalk and pedestrian pathways and chunky parts of concrete, but somehow they manage to connect up enough disparate pieces of the metropolis to link it all together in some kind of warped fishing net. And in every corner of it, it seems to have something going on, if not going right. The corner near Vernon & Jackson, where dilapidated buildings mingle with hip looking coffee joints that seem to have drifted like flotsam from Williamsburg. Hollowed out factories near wide open parks. Parts of Queens seem like they're small mill towns that have only a handful of residents, but you can turn the corner and get an unobstructed view of the UN building. You can bike alongside one of the busier thoroughfares without another soul nearby. And if you're feeling peckish, it seems as if there isn't a food option that hasn't been explored somewhere. Today: The Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory received its fair share of my wallet.

Which is to say, that somehow, through the genius of it all, somehow a group of people took a bunch of unformed land and turned it into one of the most varied and entertaining places I've ever been. And I think that the people who choose to find themselves here reflect that character, too.

bike rack sighting!

2004-06-18T14:57:00.000-03:00

Thanks to a highly informed reader, I can now add a set of bike racks at 50th between 6th and 7th Avenues to my list of possible locking locations! Very exciting news, indeed.

And it's hotter than toad fricasse out there today, folks. I made sure to indulge in a bit of excessive ice cream consumption. I still haven't made it to the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory, but I have seen it. And it looks like it would be quite the destination today (or tonight, open 'til 10pm).

Enjoy the summer solstice!

justice?

2004-06-17T16:28:00.000-03:00

Nothing would make me happier than for there to be some justice in this world for once.

This slight sign of possible justice might be a nice thing. I don't expect the UN to be able to carry it out, but it wouldn't surprise me if in 30 years we look back on this time period and define most members of the Bush administration with the moniker "war criminal" in front of any of their names. Is incompetence in the service of evil a war crime? It should be.

Of course, the most glorious scenario I have is that Bush isn't elected for the first time (nor re-instated by his daddy's supreme court), the UN finds further evidence of war crimes in the former administration, and the current administration fairly and justly allows the UN to dole out prosecution and punishment.

A boy can dream, can't he? Some days, that's all I've got.

Speaking of Coming Attractions...

2004-06-16T21:41:00.000-03:00

I don't know how much blogger likes multimedia metadata, but I thought I'd give it a shot. It might be a fun little addition to the whole blog-a-riffic experience.

Anyway...this is an eensy-weensy trailer gasp of a thing I've been working on and we're trying very, very, very hard to get into festivals and onto tv sets everywhere. Hopefully, some of this pushing, prodding, and etcetera-ing will pay off.

Enjoy!

To Go to movie...

That time of the year

2004-06-16T21:35:00.000-03:00

Biking is fast becoming an addiction, but I think I may have found the cure. Biking in Prospect Park at around dusk. Something happens then that hasn't happened in awhile to me.

Bugs.

Now, I'll admit that this shouldn't come as much of a shock. I did grow up in a similar climate, and bugs (the little gnat-like ones, or the mosquitoes) were de rigeur. But, I'd been in San Francisco...and the weird thing is, they don't have bugs there. At least not in the places that I biked (and aside from occasional mysterious ant infestations, SF is remarkably bug-free). And in Propsect Park, I was nearly picking them out of my teeth. Nearly, except that I kept my mouth closed. I think one flew up my nose. And two definitely ran kamikaze missions into my left eye. Which, when you're biking in a fairly crowded piece can be kind of hazardous. I guess I'll have to splurge and buy a nice pair of clear glasses for protection against the scourge of the skies.

In other less important news, the movie "Mean Girls" is actually a really well-done semi-darkish comdey. I laughed consistently throughout (if not constantly).

In coming attractions: a trip to College Station, Texas! And Cooperstown, NY! It's summer, I guess, and it's time to hit the road again.

Argh.

2004-06-15T10:34:00.000-03:00

Okay, I need to stop referring to unpleasant current events in this blog, otherwise the ads on the top will be mocking me for the rest of the time. I will commence to only discuss happy things, like butterflies and puppies and rubber cement dripping through homemade valentines. Yes, hopefully that will wash the nasty aftertaste of the google generated advertising schemes off my blog.

I saw the movie Word Wars last night, and though it was billed as a Spellbound-esque program, I had to admit that it fell rather short on that triple-letter score. The big difference: the filmmaker's ability to get into the characters and really convey who we were watching. The plot was simple enough; as simple as Spellbound's and structured similarly in some ways. Though, it fell well short of the characters that appeared in Spellbound -- the kids were far more compelling characters. Not that the adult stars of Word Wars didn't have their moments, but they were clearly not as open to revealing enough of themselves...or, more likely, because they had become so obsessed with their hobby/habit, they didn't have much depth to relay to a viewer. The overall effect was one of a kind of isolating, claustrophobic, disconnection. I suppose that's something, but I got the sense that wasn't really the goal of the program. The kids of Spellbound seemed to rise above their own particular obsession, handling loss and win with equal grace and true feeling, whereas the word warriors all seemed to have become completely subsumed by the scrabble addiction.

An Open Letter, for Election Day

2004-06-14T01:50:00.000-03:00

I was kind of irritated today. So, I wrote this. I'm going to post it, but I don't think it's as eloquent as my heart wants to be. Maybe some day.

Dear Mr. Would-be President,

Have you been out here? I don't mean cyberspace, because clearly you've staked your claim, poked poles in the ground and thrown up the celebratory and appropriate tents. I mean here. Out here. On this street. This street I'm walking right this minute in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, for instance. It's a lot like a lot of other streets in this country. And people out here are crying. Now, you may not be able to hear them, I think, because I think you have to have your heart attuned properly to really get the finer nuances of it. But they are definitely crying. I hear it while I watch the young mother holding her son's hand as she walks through what you might call a ghetto neighborhood. I don't consider it that, really. It's a neighborhood. There are some people hanging out on stoops, maybe they're making rude and insolent comments toward her. Maybe she's not really in the mood for it, mostly because every day she has to walk this block and keep her son's hand close to hers, keep her son's heart close to hers and fence a cage of fierce loyal love around him, keeping him safe. And in ten years, if she's lucky, maybe he won't be the one on the stoop making comments at women walking by. Maybe you've been out to this street, but I haven't heard much of it. I've heard talk about Iraq this and jobs that and yes, all of these things are important. But they aren't as important as the people here. The one's that pay you to think on the difficult matters and more importantly than that, lead.

Yes, lead. This country hasn't had a leader in years. You can rhapsodize all you might about whomever you feel has most represented your particular ideology most recently, Reagan, Clinton, Kennedy, Nixon, whomever. But there is a difference between being a politician and being a leader. And frankly, what we need right about now is a leader. This is the kind of person whose words would carry the gravitas of truth and compassion and empathy. And with those rare bubbly pieces of the cauldron, it would also encompass ideas and plans and goals and dreams. Yes, have a dream. There is nothing more important than that. Dr. King was, clearly, onto something.

I have heard of studies that show that the larger the influence of mass produced televised media, the greater difficulty children have of imagining things. I think this is the most important thing. I don't care what your viewpoint is (wild neo-conservative-I'm-going-to-get-rich-and-stay-safe-and-white-and-christian-if-it-kills-the-entire-world or something more akin to vague-platitudes-and-decrying-the-former-viewpoint), what this country needs is imagination. A reversal of the past 20 years, I think, would be a good place to start. An imagining of what this world might look like if a woman could walk through even a bad part of town and not feel that she has to react violently every step of the way in order to defend her soul, her livelihood, and her own children. This is the world that we have wrought and I don't think it is the world that any of us imagined. This is the world where we de-fund education, over-test our children, expect them to fail, and then create the economic and social conditions where they can live down to those standards. And then use that lack of success as justification for some other machiavellian re-arrangement of priorities. What kind of a world would we live in if we actually DID care about the children -- and not just the unborn, white, christian ones? Even the ones that are forced into a situation that is untenable. It's not an unimaginable place. Sure, it may seem like a utopia to some. A kind of far away paradise that you get postcards about, but have never had the pleasure of visiting.

A leader maybe has a collection of those postcards. Maybe even a roadmap. Not a series of useless backwards, Orwellian platitudes. A leader has seen this street. Has even walked on it a few times. Maybe even rented an apartment and heard the screams at night, the squealing tires in the middle of the day. Seen the young mother and her beautiful, adorable child struggling to make it home at night. Carrying her tiny load of groceries. A leader would walk beside her and insist that he know more. That he help more. Because there is so much more help to do and so much more knowledge to have. And the people on this street, the people on every street in this country are crying out for that leader.

I know people will toss the platitude, "lead and the leaders will follow." But I would counter and say that is exactly what I am saying. If you say you are a leader, prove it. Go out there and feel this world. And then feel that there is nothing more important than leading that vision of a better world. If you actually search this deep inside yourself and outside, as well, you may begin to understand what it takes to be a real humanitarian, a real leader -- and not just another politician.

Don't try this at home

2004-06-12T20:22:00.000-03:00

Hard to believe that this is located in New York City. But, it is. Along the scenic and seemingly under-utilized Shore Parkway Greenway. Granted if you turn your head 180 degrees, you'll be able to see the traffic jam that runs on the Belt Parkway out to JFK. But, when you're biking you don't have to turn your head that direction at all and you can pretend you're out in some kind of beachy keen seaside town. Of course, that illusion is broken severely by the fact that the NYC greenway system is somewhat flawed. For instance, breezing out past Pennsylvania Avenue and 278, you'll find yourself on a chunky, nearly unpaved little bike path...that surprisingly leads you directly onto the freeway. I stood at the shoulder of the Belt Parkway and wondered what happened to my bike path. A trip in through town, circling through Howard Beach, Lindenwood, and other demure water bordering communities will take you a fair amount of time to circumnavigate. Though, the bike path into Broad Channel is almost worth it. Imagine a town that hangs American flags on every single house. It's like I died and ended up in some kind of weird Pleasantville inspired psychotic 'burb. Truly a burbling little community, which on the day of my ride was busily raising money for the volunteer fire department. If I weren't choking on the saccharine aftertaste, I'd almost think it was quaint. Across the bridge is the sleepy beach community of something. I'm not sure. I think it's called Cross Channel or Beach Channel or something like that. Jacob Riis Park is somewhere on this strip of land. And again, the NYC greenway fails the test (and the NYC bike map, as well), as it seems to recommend taking a road that is not terribly wide and features some crazy, fairly fast paced cars. Not for the fainthearted at all. Then, when it does connect with the "greenway," you get treated to a barely paved (does gravel and sand count? -- That's the featured surface covering at several junctures) road that does finally lead up to the Marine Parkway Bridge.

The bridge (which features a sign -- universally ignored -- that tells you to walk your bike across the bridge) is one of those lovely metal grate surfaced ones (thankfully, not where the bicyclists and pedestrians are. Expect to hear strange whirring sounds and watch the guardrail bars shake back and forth with some kind of resonant frequency motion. Fun!

All told, quite the ride. Flatbush Avenue, which jacknifes straight from the Marine Parkway greenway is not terribly bikeable until you get closer to Avenue Q (oh, excuse me "Quentin Avenue"), at which point it resembles biking on any large 3 lane thoroughfare that you might experience in the middle of the northside of Chicago, which is to say, also not for the faint of heart or not so fleet of feet. Expect bus exhaust and erratic SUV driving. Flatbush hits Bedford Avenue, which has a decent bike lane, though might be the slower, more hilly route (it climbs up through Crown Heights a bit on its way to Bergen Street bike lane).

What's Hot!

2004-06-11T17:02:00.000-03:00

Biking in New York City is, at best, a speed trial and at worst an exercise in life or death obstacle racing. Today, I got to change hats and pretend to be a bike messenger (more or less) as I delivered some tapes to a midtown client. This involved biking the Brooklyn Bridge (still, a B- bike path as far as I'm concerned. It baffles me as to why there aren't more crushed pedestrians in between the wooden planks considering how haphazardly and blindly they wander out into the bike lane). I was passed by a cyclist wearing the U.S. Postal Service outfit.

#1 Hot thing: U.S. Postal Service cycling outfits. Hey, for all I know, he probably was on the U.S. Postal Service cycling team. They did have the day off, after all. 'Bout the only good thing Reagan ever did was give government employees today off. It's always seemed strange the post office has a cycling team, though. I mean, if they had a really committed one, wouldn't my mail actually get where it's going faster?

Biking from the Brooklyn Bridge up into midtown can happen in a variety of ways. I was feeling frisky today, so I took the route directly through town. That follows Centre Street up through to Union Square (it turns into some other street...Broadway, maybe?) on its way there. This isn't a terrible route, though at the Chinatown juncture, you pretty much feel like your arms are going to fall off from the pothole absorption and you're going to get crushed by buses and taxis converging upon you.

Around Union Square, I made the choice to turn up and take 6th Avenue as best as I could. Turns out 6th isn't as bad a street as one might think. Sure, it's filled with a million people (probably literally) and taxis left and right and erratic stop and go traffic and...okay, so it's not a great route. And it only develops a minor bike lane around Times Square and only lasts for a few blocks to Bryant Park. Still, it didn't seem as over-trafficked as I would've expected it to be.

#2 Hot thing: Hairnets. Oh my! It's the sexy look for the new year. Mark my words, when the fall fashions come out, it's going to be nothing but hairnets.

I will now comment on the sorely lacking bike parking facilities in NY. In fact, in comparison to a hick burg like, oh say, San Francisco, NY blows. There aren't a plethora of parking meters (which I'd settle for). There are almost no actual bike locking posts (save for a set in front of B&H Photo). And strapping your bike to those flimsy punctured holed out metal posts seems like you're asking for trouble. My advice: if you've gotta bike and park in NYC have at least 2 good locks (a u shaped and a chain for maximum versatility).

#3 Hot thing: Throwing your hand up and standing in the bike lane while you try to hail a cab. If you can decapitate a bike messenger (or me), you get an extra $10 off at Prada. SuperMegaGalactic Hot!

Coming back down from midtown, I utilized 7th Avenue. At Times Square...fuhgeddaboutit. It's enough to make you feel like you're in LA traffic. Thankfully, this clears pretty dramatically around 28th St. and you can jet almost all the way down to Spring St. (where I crossed over to get into the City Hall Park area) without too much difficulty. And traffic gets very thin at the Village, so you'll feel like you're all alone on 5 lanes of traffic. Nice. I will say that having a rear view (or the ability to turn your head back and forth repeatedly while you ride) is absolutely helpful.

#4 Hot thing: Shoes that are so ungainly and clunky that they make you trip over even pavement. Sooooo hot. The only thing hotter than that? Taking yourself so seriously that you can't even laugh (or even crack a smile!) about how silly it is when you do trip. This is like lava hot, I'm tellin' you.

An American Treasure says farewell

2004-06-10T17:10:00.000-03:00

While everyone is in the business of canonizing the newly departed Ronald Reagan (did anyone else live through the 80s? Or was it just me?), a real American treasure has also left the building -- Ray Charles. His lasting accomplishments and legacy are far richer and more uplifting than anything the gipper may try to lay claim to.

Now, if we're going to put a recently deceased American icon on a piece of currency, I can't think of anyone more deserving and emblematic than Ray Charles. I say we mint a $25 bill in his honor. Who's with me? And Reagan can have the $2. And we won't print anymore of those, because $2 isn't worth a damn, like most of the so-called accomplishments that Reagan might claim.

As we all know these deaths generally line up in threes, I'd be interested to know what tomorrow's toll might yield. I think I'm safe, though; this particular trinity is looking to be fairly high profile.

This must be some kind of a cultural thing

2004-06-10T01:59:00.000-03:00

I'll admit it -- I've not been in NY very long, so maybe this is just how free movies work here (they work differently in other cities I've lived in when they've actually shown free movies, at least). Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that In-Style magazine was one of the bigger sponsors...but, I went to the fabulous Rockefeller "drive-in" movie thing at around 8:40 last night. Show starts at dusk. And they had fenced off the entire square where the theater screen was located. Okay, fine, good crowd control technique. Each gate was covered by a Rock-center-a-cop. Fine, too. But, in the middle, where all of the chairs were located...there were empty seats. And the rock-cops weren't letting anyone into them. A full 45 minutes before the show would even start. I asked one of the guards when you needed to arrive to get seated. He said, "About 8." For a show that starts at 9:15ish. Sure, it's free...but maybe the saying "time is money" hasn't made it to these here parts. Sitting around for 1:15 to see a free movie. Well, I guess you get what you pay for. I was a little discouraged, though, if I'd planned to make an evening of it, I could've graced the lower deck restaurant with my presence. But, as the security guard noted, "Then you'd be paying for the movie." Tomorrow night is Danny Deckchair which I really, really, really tried to convince myself that it would be a fun movie to see (if it were free). But, I'm afraid the trailer and the premise is forcing my opinion in completely the opposite direction. I'm sure it's going to be wonderful, really (okay, no, actually it looks pretty dreadfully dull. And like a rip-off of a Bloom County cartoon from 20 years ago). If you don't mind devoting your entire evening to watching it. Good luck!

Images from the Museum Mile

2004-06-09T17:58:00.000-03:00

Summer's here...

2004-06-08T22:20:00.000-03:00

I spotted my first lightning bug of the year. To me, growing up in a place where there were nothing but swarms of lightning bugs as the hot summer nights paraded through town, this is a sure indication that summer has officially arrived. I don't know if lightning bugs (or fireflies) only come out when summer finally arrives.

The Museum Mile Festival was greeted with lovely summer skies, as well. And, damn, there are a lot of people at that thing. Lines around the block for the Guggenheim and the Neue something or other. Even the Cooper-Hewitt Design museum. I went there and to the Met before high-tailing it back to Brooklyn via bicycle.

And also, via Lexington Avenue. Let me say, if you're an urban cyclist, Lexington is as close to skydiving as I think I'd like to get. From 90th to 50th, you fight cabs all the way up the block, but if you go about 30 or so, you hit almost every light 10 blocks at a time. And you beat the cabs downtown, even. After 50th, Lexington gets very rutted and it's best to get away from there. The other thing I've noticed about biking in Manhattan (also in Brooklyn) is the grime factor. I stopped at one point to wipe some sweat from my brow to discover a thick layer of grit that had been kicked up and deposited on my forehead. I guess that's why they call it the gritty city. Or do they call it that?

It's been brought to my attention by the lovely comment board that Matt Nathanson is playing this Thursday. I first saw Matt about 2 years ago when he opened for one of my favorite performers, Dar Williams. Matt puts on a fantastic show with a lot of energy. And even though I wasn't familiar with his material the last time I saw him (January at the Bowery Ballroom), he once again delivered a fantastic show. Part of the highlights of any Nathanson show are the giddy in-between song stories that he shares and his inclination to start covering any song that comes to mind. Usually, he ends with a rousing sing-a-long to Bon Jovi. It's like karaoke with a few hundred of your closest friends. Highly recommended. Sadly, I slept on this particular ticket, so I will have to catch him another year. He's co-headlining with a band that I'm not all that interested in seeing, so maybe I'll hold out for a smaller venue and a single headlining situation.

Pictures from the festival coming soon...

Closing Time

2004-06-08T04:36:00.000-03:00

I don't, as a rule, spend much time in bars. In fact, you might even say that I almost never spend any time in a bar. Last night, though, I was in a bar when it closed for the first time in my life. And I got to witness a virtuoso performance by a barfly as she regaled the limited audience (3 of us) about anything and everything from her sordid and storied life. Stories included the time she hit 4 cars in a parking garage, closed out an open mike at a rap record release party, when she got divorced from her german ex-husband, made $200 from an infidelitious spouse. My, it was almost as good as the best fiction. Better, perhaps, as most books don't talk with a southern lilt, unless they're written by Tennessee Williams.

Plus, the bar itself was a very lovely space and the bartender was a nice fellow. Maybe I'll got to more bars this year, if only to plumb the depths for the next good story. It's really all about good stories.

incredible!

2004-06-06T20:56:00.000-03:00

I think it will be a truly spectacular possible evening on Tuesday, if for this reason alone.

Tastes like pudding

2004-06-06T11:43:00.001-03:00

I had never had rice pudding before...and today, that all changed. And, I must admit...it tastes kinda like pudding. Like, normal pudding, really. Except, occasionally you find tiny chunks of rice in there which is nice and tapioca-like, but it's nothing mindbending at all. The flavors though are quite lovely and the concept behind the whole store -- a place that serves nothing but rice pudding seems weird enough that it just might work. While I was there business was brisk but not terribly crowded. Though for $5/bowl, they can afford to not cram them in like an ice cream parlor, probably. The decor is nicely star trek and the employees wear little revolutionary black hats (if they were berets and talked with snooty French accents, it might be perfect). Overall, a lovely experience. And, I guess I preferred that dessert to the cake that I had later, so chalk one up for the pudding people.

2004-06-06T11:43:00.000-03:00

Vodka=bad for brit singers

2004-06-04T02:12:00.000-03:00

At least, that's what Beth Orton told the crowd that had crammed sardine style in to Pianos on the lower east side tonight. I'd never been to Pianos, which is a long-ish bar with a small-ish back room. I don't know how many people had squeezed in there, but it felt like nearly 100 in a space not a whole lot bigger than my living room/kitchen area. Beth performed only songs from an as-yet-unreleased album, which from my perspective have the makings of being a pretty good release. No one had ever heard any of the songs and a number of them were pretty catchy and she has one of the more gorgeous voices on the planet. Though, I think she's a bit self-conscious of the whole thing, as she over-reverbs as a rule. I'd definitely put her and Chan Marshall (Cat Power) on a similar level, vocal-wise. She complained during the performance of having drunk too much vodka the night before because she was so nervous. A number of the songs started and stopped, with Beth having to re-tune or fix the tuning that she had tried. One song she stopped as her voice gave out (again, due to the vodka, or so she said). All the time, she maintained a graciousness and self-deprecatory humor. A lovely show. Too bad I don't have any pictures of the exceptionally large people who sashayed in front of me to park themselves and block all available view from the shorter folks that were standing behind them.

on the train

2004-06-03T10:29:00.000-03:00

On the subway, I was sitting in front of a woman who was singing to herself. Another passenger made a comment regarding this and the woman launched into her defense. "I'm singing, sometimes I just need to sing. I need to keep myself in the right frame of mind, a happy frame of mind, to be happy all the time. I see you're studying, I got myself an education, it's the best thing I've got, thank the lord for that. Sometimes, I just have to sing. It's this song in my head, Mary J. Blige, you know her?"

Does anyone know how to guess the weather?

2004-06-02T13:50:00.000-03:00

I don't believe in umbrellas -- not that they don't exist. I'm quite sure they do exist, but I just can never feel like carrying it around just in case seems like a good use of my available digits. It must be my experience in cities like Pittsburgh and Chicago, where if it rains, the wind usually kicks up with such ferocity as to render an umbrella inside out. And after destroying enough umbrellas in my youth, it seemed like just wearing a nice somewhat waterproof jacket was just as good. And realizing that the semi-permeable membrane of my epidermis still managed to keep out most of the water. So, I'm mostly interested in trying to figure out when I'll get caught in a torrential downpour in New York. Just for my edification, I guess. I suppose I could look at the weather forecasts, but that always seems to be like cheating.

image I don't have

2004-06-02T13:47:00.000-03:00

When I went biking last weekend, I saw in the corner of a second floor building window a child. Maybe a toddler. Pacifier in her mouth. And she was sitting in the window ledge area that was fenced in by bars that are normally placed on window fittings to keep people from breaking in. The bars jut out just far enough to protect for an air conditioner installation. In the glimpse I had, it looked like a window seat playpen for the child. The window was closed, and the toddler seemed to look out over the street scene without an expression, trapped by the bars of the apartment window. This was in Williamsburg on Myrtle Avenue.

Is it just me?

2004-06-01T01:13:00.000-03:00

I noticed an ad plastered all over the G-train this afternoon (so, it might be just me) for Verizon's yellow pages. And I have to say...it is insanely creepy! There's this little evil cartoon yellow pages making all kinds of rude suggestions about how he can "get all up in my business" as they might say. I think one of the ads said, "If it were any more crowded in here, I'd be in your pants." Excuse me? If your anthropomorphic yellow page a** was in my pants, you, me and Verizon would be getting into a nice little lawsuit chat. Beyond the nature of the "we're trying so hard to be hip and failing oh so tremendously" lingo, the caricature of the phone book looks kind of like a leering peeping tom. And that might be giving leering peeping toms a bad name.

Well, maybe the ad will disappear before anyone else gets a chance to be revolted by it. And to swear off using Verizon for anything (if possible...I need to get to work on that).

Muffin recipe #1

2004-06-01T00:59:00.000-03:00

I did promise this at some point. And just to keep those who probably have been salivating at the mere thought of a good muffin recipe from um...drooling too much, here it is:

1 stick of butter
3/4 c sugar
2 bananas
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1 3/4c flour
1/2 c vanilla yogurt
2 tsp lemon zest
1 tsp orange zest
1 tbsp lemon juice

These measurements are very rough. I usually just eyeball the consistency. Which might say more about how many times in my life I've made muffins more than anything else.

Anyhow: melt the butter, cream the sugar, crush the bananas as much as possible and combine it all in a bowl. Mix well. Add the vanilla, yogurt, baking soda. Mix. Add the flour. Mix some more. Add the zest. Keep on mixing. Add the juice. Use the yogurt to thin the batter if it seems to thick, or add more flour if it seems too runny. It should be like a porridge consistency.

Dollop equally into a greased muffin tin. Bake for almost 30 minutes at 350 until the tops brown a bit and a knife comes out clean. Voila!

Yep, no eggs in this recipe. The muffins will mostly taste lemony, with a hint of banana. The bananas act as a binder instead of the eggs. The best thing I've learned about these muffins is that they remain good the following day...in fact, you can even freeze them and then thaw them out gradually as you want them and they remain pretty good. But maybe that's just for me. They are best served warm out of the oven, of course.

Brr...

2004-05-31T13:22:00.000-03:00

Okay, I'm pretty sure I ordered a nice sunny day for Memorial Day. I think I have the receipt around here somewhere...

Anyway. It started out pretty sunny (at around 7 in the morning, mind you), but turned overcast and gray equally quickly. This wouldn't have been so discouraging if I hadn't decided to bike to Queens this morning. I was aiming to take the Triborough bridge into Ward's Island and then across to Manhattan, which in theory would've been a very nice ride, indeed. Except, I forgot my map. So, I made a few wrong turns, ending up in the malodorous section of East Williamsburg (I'm sure this is where the bodies must be buried...) and then somehow, miraculously finding the Pulaski footbridge to cross into Queens. After that, I blindly circumnavigated across via Vernon Road all the way up into Astoria. I passed the legendary Queensbridge section of town -- made famous (or infamous) by sparring rappers KRS-ONE and Marley Marl in the late 1980s. Or at least, made famous to me due to the fact that I listened to rap songs like "South Bronx" wherein KRS-ONE derides Marl for being from Queensbridge. As far as I could tell, it was the cookie cutter NY project with a park down beneath the Queensboro Bridge. Not terribly remarkable or particularly derision worthy. Maybe it's a sissy project (or was back in the 1980s)... Anyway, I was expecting Astoria to be somewhat interesting, either architecture-wise or something. But it just reminded me of far off stretches of the west side of Chicago. Again, completely unremarkable. A lot of somewhat decay bound buildings and shops with signs that look like most other parts of the further out sections of Brooklyn. For my money, Greenpoint had better architecture and storefronts. Of course, I was getting a bit chilled at this point and so ended up looping back to what I had mistakenly thought was the Triborough Bridge. It was actually the footbridge to Roosevelt Island, NY's answer to planned communities. The bridge itself dead ends into a parking garage. How convenient! I'm not sure if this is the only way in or out of Roosevelt Island, but it's kind of spooky. The bridge itself looks like someone upchucked a vat of Pepto Bismol. There's something unnatural about pink bridges. I headed from there to the Queensboro Bridge. A fairly long steep incline greets the bicyclist until it levels out and finally drops you at about E.60th or so in Manhattan. I took another stab at the east side greenway -- it's much better below E. 45th or so, and headed home. So far, I can definitely say that the Brooklyn Bridge is not the best bridge to bike. It's wooden planked, highly trafficked and not terribly wide. All of the other bridges I've crossed seem to be very low traffic and sufficiently wide for that. I recommend using the Manhattan Bridge whenever possible if you have to cross into Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Heights interchange.

Procrastination...it's what's for dinner

2004-05-29T21:27:00.000-03:00

Taken on a stroll through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden shortly after a torrential downpour dumped nearly 4 inches of water on my living room floor. The roses looked happier about this situation than I did.

Taken tonight about five minutes later than I wanted to. It's amazing how fast dusk turns to darkness. I'm sure that's a metaphor for life, too.

Glad to see that torture isn't the only thing we do well...

2004-05-29T21:10:00.000-03:00

Apparently, we also specialize in intimidation and suppression of free speech!

In San Francisco, no less...

If I didn't believe our country was in a terrible state of affairs, I suppose this might confirm it.

Sigh. My only real hope is that whomever took the universe that I was living in 4 years ago will decide to bring it back and exchange it for this one. It's not much of a hope, I guess. If I had taken possession of that universe, I wouldn't want to exchange it, either.

They call this a greenway?

2004-05-29T17:12:00.000-03:00

Okay, just a bone of contention. But, wait, first the backstory... (don't you wish all cinematic endeavors worked this way?) I sprained my foot a few months ago and as my encouraging and seemingly completely off his rocker doctor told me, "Oh, you'll be fine in 10 days." Well, 10 days passed. And then 10 more. And then 5 times that. And my foot is still not up to extreme...whatever it is that feet do to the extreme. Footing the bill. Whatever. Anyway, my doc sucks rocks. I'm going to get a new one. But, that's not really the back story, exactly. The back story is that I haven't been playing ultimate recently and I desperately didn't want to turn into some kind of large sloth like creature. So, I took up my favorite non-impact sport: biking. And I took it up with quite a bit of glee, actually, discovering that NYC is really friggin' big. I mean, enormous. I lived in San Francisco for a long time and biked through the streets there, but NYC makes it seem like some kind of isolated backwater. Which, in many ways, it is. So, with a great amount of enthusiasm, I began tracing down all of the various and sundry greenways in the city. I can now safely report on 3 of them after a trip today. In order of disappointment:

1. The East River greenway: heck, I don't even know exactly what the damn thing is called, but it shouldn't have the word "greenway" anywhere in its title. It could be called the "loose affiliation of open spaces not entirely dominated by automobiles, mostly, except for the part where it diverges onto the 4 lane mad taxi filled avenue." It's not a greenway! Where you can bike, uninterrupted by cars, there are no paths. It's just a promenade of sorts. And then, the promenade is filled with people walking dogs, meandering, or worse yet, sunbathing. What is the east side nyer's fascination with accelerating the aging process? And they sunbathe everywhere! I saw three people who had dragged out their chaise lawn plastic lounge chairs into the middle of a promenade (yes, on the faux greenway) to sit, nearly underneath an overpass leading to the Manhattan Bridge. And there are numerous benches here, too. I'm sure this sounds a bit like a screed -- actually, I found it exceptionally humorous and very telling about the general NY mindset: basically, we'll make it work. Whatever we want to do, we'll figure out a way to live our life the way we want to, environmental circumstances be damned. I actually quite respect and admire that tenacity. But enough about the average NY mindset. This greenway blows chunks. I'm taking Broadway the next time. At least I know I'll almost get killed by a taxi there, instead of having my inner ear jarred loose by cobblestone pavement (that looks great for a promenade, mind you. But isn't a greenway! Have I made my point yet?

2. The Ocean Avenue Greenway: What the hell? Yeah, okay, it's a "greenway" in the truest sense of the word. No cars can drive on it. But it's positioned in the most precarious of places -- in between a very active near-freeway that is Ocean Ave (or should be called Ocean Expressway or something) and the one way side streets that are also Ocean Ave. All running parallel. Okay, fine, no big deal. Except, cars going 35-50 are making panic right turns across the breaks in the greenway to go on Avenue X, Y, or Z, often not looking to see if the greenway bicyclist is actually crossing on their green light as well. To top that off, the greenway cyclist view of potential death is highly obscured by...well, by greenway greenery. And the pavement looks like some worm from the movie "Tremors" had lunch there. My advice: stick on the side streets -- better pavement, better sightlines, less chance of getting hit by a car. And, hey, either way you twist it, it's a great way to get out to coney island .

3. The West Side Greenway: I have to say, I'm impressed with this in comparison to everything else I've seen so far (but I'm not done, yet...). It marries a decent pavement with a streamlined route that is both safe and effective. I can get up to 104th in almost 30 minutes from the WTC, even on a pretty windy day. It does occasionally have to stray into promenade territory, but the promenades are paved evenly (instead of cobblestoned...who thought of that, anyway?) and are wide enough to accommodate two lanes of traffic (most of the time). It does jog off into an underpass at 125th and the famous Cotton Club, but it gives the side benefit of biking past the fabulous Fairway Market, which always smells like fresh baked bagels or pizza. Though, directly thereafter you'll be regaled with the odors of the NYC sewage system, as you take a slight detour through what appears to be off-limit governmental waste sites or something. Ah, the "only in NY" contrasts are lovely at times. I've yet to take it further than 181st, but my only real complaint is that it's often very difficult to get out of the greenway and into a city street that far north.

Phew. Anyway, I still like biking. And I like biking in NY, too. Maybe some day, I'll like biking into upstate NY, but we'll just have to see how my foot handles that. Coming soon: a detail of the bridges of NYC (way more exciting and sexy than "The Bridges of Madison County"...)

Storms and sushi

2004-05-28T23:15:00.000-03:00

I like watching people making sushi. It's like watching someone paint.

I don't have very much insight into the rest of today, though. It rained really hard. For some reason, most of that rain came in through my window. I needed a garbage can to catch all of the water. And towels. And I think I got most of it. Phew.

I also had this strange realization and I have it almost every time it happens to me. I find that whenever I hear myself discussing the weather with someone else, I immediately know that I have almost nothing to say to that person. Not only do I have nothing to say to them, I feel like they would rather I were anywhere but near them. It's sadly the only thing I have in common with them at that given point in time -- the fact that we're both alive and breathing air and subject to our environment. I may have other things in common with this person, but either they or I have chosen to lock up all of those doors, batten (is that a word?) our own personal emotional hatches and hide out inside ourselves until this hurricane of socializing passes by. The Perfect Interpersonal Storm, as it were. So, weather=death knell for conversation. It's hard for me to recover completely from bringing up the weather. I think I'll need to work on some other thing that everyone on the planet has in common so I can use that instead. Might be a good variation to work in.

This has nothing to do with sushi, though. I always order too much sushi because it looks so very good and sounds so very good when I order it. I have a feeling day old sushi isn't quite the same, though I don't know if I've ever actually had day old sushi.

I think Day Old Sushi would be a good name for a band, though.

Fiction: The Tent

2004-05-27T17:29:00.000-03:00

Inside the tent he was certain there was something waiting for him. Not something that he wanted to find, necessarily, but something that he was bound to find. He could see the slow flicker of kerosene lamplight as it made shadow puppet stories across the walls. Anthropologists would've marveled at the likeness to the first cave drawings, in fact. He knew that this was trying to tell him something. But he sat there, motionless, the hotness on his face from dying embers of the campfire. He was sure it was the fire that had flushed his face to sunburn. Though when he rubbed his hands below his eyes, he was certain that he felt a dampness. He put his hands to his tongue to make sure, but he didn't need to test it.

He was amazed at the way sound traveled in the night this far away from anywhere. It was, as she had convinced him earlier in the day, the middle of nowhere. Like a black hole, but with trees. If he were to clap his hands together loudly, the sound would almost instantly be sucked off into some other dimension. No reverberations, and a crisp silence would rush in and cover him up. This silence, layered with crackling twigs, scuttling branches, the ticks of katydids and songs of night owls was all around them, thick as cottony pajamas. He was certain she was already asleep inside the tent, even with the lamplight betraying that activity. Dousing the fire with a squirt from a water bottle was enough to prepare him for the inevitable.

Cottony pajamas. Of course, he had forgotten his, so he stripped to underwear and slid inside the sleeping bag. There was a reason he wanted those on right now. The tickle of ice that crept along his back and sent bumps to his skin. It wasn't cold out, actually, but it was cold in. There was the gulf between he and she. They were hair's breadth apart, in some ways. They were oceans apart, others. She tussled, unconscious it seemed, stretching out her arms like a newborn, fingers twisting, grasping but getting nothing but air. And then relaxing, curling upon herself into a cocoon. He rolled over and closed his eyes, yearning for black inky voids to overtake his vision.

This is the thing. It's a long hallway, very high ceilings. Everything is canted. Like a funhouse mirror universe, you can't walk through the hallway the way you might want to. The floor twists with every step, the walls shake and reverberate. At the end of the hall, that's his apartment. He knows it is, but when he is inside it feels foreign, unwelcoming. An interrogation room in his mind. All white starched walls, suffocating air, so much air and nothing, absolutely nothing furnishing it. There is a chair in the middle that sits like an island buffeted by the twisting floorboards that he walks on. They are as concrete as gelatin and he grasps the chair for what he can. He climbs into it, feeling at last to have found some solace, a life preserver in the room of his own making. He is small in the chair, dwarfed by the walls, the ceiling, the legs of the chair. He wants to turn on the stereo, to play music so very loudly, but he is afraid that he will wake her up. He is in his dream, but still he is afraid of waking her up.

"You're snoring."
He rolls over, blinks away the dream, barely. He still feels wobbly, on top of something that maybe he climbed too quickly to get to. A head rush, so he sees little tiny stars in his view. "I am?" he offers weakly as a retort.
"Yes. I couldn't sleep."
"I was dreaming about my apartment. I think I was dreaming about you, too."
She cocks her head to one side, leaning on her arm, the sound of the night flooding the tent through the open fly. Their voices sound staticky, like the words might stick to their clothes if they aren't careful to avoid getting too close. Too close with words, he thinks. That is the problem with staticky voices.
"Do tell."
"I wanted to play music really loudly. I had left my door open so that you could hear it, but I didn't want to wake you up, either."
She rolls back on her back. The top of the tent, like looking into a cathedral ceiling, the way the poles converge at the zenith. She could hear a mosquito trespassing. She didn't really want to hear him right now. She really felt much more adept at just guessing him. "It's a metaphor, isn't it?"
"What is?"
"The dream. You dream in metaphors."
"I do?"
"Yes, you do." She could feel her ire rise, her voice jumped up a bit, her throat constricting. She didn't want to do that, though, so she paused, feeling her blood course around again. Pump, pump, pump. The heartbeat she could feel in her forehead was hers alone. He was not in her blood, thankfully.

There is this pause. Like silence, like the flood of the night that comes over the tent, that seems to wash it away, pitch it fully out into the ocean of other possible silences that lap and wave out in the nighttime of the world. The tent, moored only by three stakes in the ground, moored only by two people clasped tight as padlocks on the floor of it all. The night silence sluices across the top, across the bottom, through the fly. It fills up the space in between, a dark brackish silence. And then, you're drowning in it. You can't breathe for the silence, it isn't deafening, it isn't quieting, it isn't suffocating. It just overtakes you until you become just another part of it. And it's all around the tent, it's leaking inside the tent. That is the pause. That is the pause that they hear between each other. She breaks the pause, the brackish watery feeling on her skin is too much to bear.

"This isn't necessarily a place I wanted to be."

He turns over, uncertain, dreams playing like unspooled film sliding through his fingers. Single images, glimpsed for seconds at a time. He could almost put it together into a story. Almost.

Quick, use this duct tape and a shovel...

2004-05-26T20:17:00.000-03:00

...and this piece of lint...and...

News today: Al-qaida is poised "to strike U.S. hard."

Why should this be a newsflash? I kind of remember being around in 2001 when (if memory serves) they already DID this. Did anyone think that they "hit U.S. hard" and then decided they were done? Clearly, judging by the current administration's foreign policies, whatever message they had sent was well-received and we can all just go about our business. The truly dumbfounding nature of telling the American public that there is credible intelligence that something might happen is that I could've given up that kind of intelligence. And, hey, I'm a fairly credible source. I mean, something could happen anytime. That's the nature of existence. Things do happen. Some of them are horrific. Some of them aren't. Truly, though, the only reason to broadcast this kind of information to the general populace is to cya -- cover GWB's ass. So, when something does happen, he can say, "Well, I told you so." And then we can all say, "Oh, yeah, I guess he did." Well, guess what? 9/11 told us so. We're EMPLOYING this (yes, we pay him $250K a year or so...does anyone think he's earning it?) to STOP IT FROM HAPPENING AGAIN (among other things that he isn't doing. He's spent more time on vacation in the past 4 years than any president before him. Has he earned any of it?). Veiled threats and vague information is not protection. It's not security. It's insecurity. It's fear. And they've been trying to breed it so they can stay in power.

Fire the bastard.

Canceling Cable

2004-05-26T11:04:00.000-03:00

TV is a necessary evil in my life. I work with it on a daily basis, so generally it's a good idea to have it lying around...just in case. At least, that's what I initially thought. But, after having it around "just in case" for a couple of months, I've come to the disturbing conclusion that despite there being oodles and oodles of television, I just don't have (sigh) the attention span for it. I think I've found that having that many television stations has deteriorated my ability to focus on any one task, like, say, watching an entire program. Not only that, the only thing I end up watching is stuff I've already seen before. I tend to get my headlines from the internet, so I have no need for the gruesome depictions of depraved modern day life and colonialism that it offers. And so far, I haven't seen anything on a tv screen this year that outstripped the inventiveness or ingenuity from things like The Triplets of Belleville or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- two things that I wouldn't have had the opportunity to see on my cable box for maybe a year into the future. It's not a great way to stay on the cutting edge of my profession actually. My co-worker has argued that I should have it for HBO. I have to admit that the shows on that particular station are very well crafted. And I'm totally uninterested. I guess it comes down to a choice: (a la Shawshank Redemption) get busy watching, or get busy doing. I think I've finally decided that doing beats watching. Maybe it's just that coming out of hibernation feeling that spring/summer brings, too.

TV, like any addictive substance, needs to be contained and handled. I'm struck, though, by the perhaps genetic similarity that I may have to my brother. He doesn't own a television for this reason. If a television is present in the room, he will become transfixed by it, unable to tear himself away. I believe the choice to not own a tv is as much driven by this known inability to hold sway over the addictive substance as anything else. And though my addiction may be less formidable, I can feel it bubbling over in the cauldron of my veins. And I'd rather take that energy and have something to show for it, other than a deep indentation in my sofa.

The Runaround

2004-05-25T22:46:00.000-03:00

========

That doesn't really have anything to do with anything.

But, this does. It's not something that you may really feel very strongly about, but it just happens to be in my face right now, so I can't help it. I'm working on a program about identity theft and, as such, I'm perhaps uniquely sensitive to the subject. Not so much in the "how do I keep people from taking my identity and stealing all of my financial geegaws" sense of things, but more in the "why are so many financial institutions so invested in selling protection from this to consumers?" In the program I'm working on, the presenter makes an interesting point in that the only people who can really control identity theft are the companies that are responsible for issuing the credit in the first place. And those same companies turn around and sell the ability to protect us from what is -- in essence -- their own craven greed or blunt incompetence. Either way, it seems, actually kind of criminal. It's like you're giving these companies your trust and they're basically in the business of betraying it and then selling it back to you as some kind of competitive advantage over other companies in the same business. Want fraud protection? Sign here! When, in reality, what they ought to say is, "Want real fraud protection? Don't give anything to us, we'll just handle it carelessly, or better yet, sell it to some borderline psychopath who will impersonate you and buy a lot of hummel figurines for his shrine to Orgatz, God of the Unholy Spork Festival. Or something. I think I kinda got lost in the ramble again. I do have to watch out for that.

I'm also working on a program about gay marriage. That's far more emboldening in the whole "human spirit" kind of thing. If I balance the programs properly, I'll be equally paranoid and uplifted. Which may not be a good mixture at any rate.

I really, really feel strongly, though, that the word "geegaw" needs to make a serious comeback. I'm hoping that someone will work it into street slang or something. Maybe I could get a tv show on MTV called Pimp My Geegaw.*

*Note to unfamiliar viewers: I don't actually watch MTV, so I'm mostly making statements on the basis of hearsay, conjecture, and promotional trailers.

Condo Mania

2004-05-25T00:13:00.000-03:00

So, I learn today that my building is goin' condo. I'm not sure how I feel about it, until I read the fine print of just how much they've set the purchase price for. If I were drinking a fine, cold beverage, it would've been spit out across the room. Despite the ridiculous cost they're estimating, I also notice in the fine print that they've mis-estimated where I'm living. They have it listed as a studio! I'm quite certain I have a bedroom, here. Really. I think I slept in it last night, in fact. Does this mean that if someone were to buy my apartment, that I would be able to remain on in the bedroom that doesn't exist? Or, rather, does that mean that every night I step into a parallel dimension, like a wardrobe to narnia when I sleep.

Well, that would definitely explain some of the dreams that I've been having.

The Big Gaping Hole

2004-05-22T14:40:00.000-03:00

I went for a bike ride this morning (you have to love the west side highway bike path in New York City, especially the part where it jumps out onto the street for a bit, right by the historic Cotton Club and passes in front of the Fairway Market, which smells of freshly baked bagels and pizza and then jumps back against Riverside Park and smells immediately like a sewage treatment plant). On the way back home, I got stuck coming crosstown in front of the site of the World Trade Center towers. I had been by the site many times before, but I guess never on a weekend. And I was amazed. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people lined every inch of viewable space around the enormous crater where the towers once stood. I passed by a group of young women, strapping on rollerblades, hanging over their bicycles. I could overhear a snippet of their conversation, and they were talking about someone that they had known who had worked there. I navigated up the street to hear the vendor at one of the small food shops next to the site bellow, "If you're ready for lunch, we're ready for you!" I had two contrary thoughts simultaneously -- the first, that only in America would we commercialize our tragedies and the second, that leaving this space empty for the future generations would've been the greatest and most sensible tribute to those that died there. But, of course not. We're going to build some ridiculously large structure to cover up the past because it'd be terrible to remember something in this, the country of historical ADD.

I guess that's not as profound as it felt when I biked through there.

Vermin!

2004-05-22T01:40:00.000-03:00

I just think "vermin" is a terribly underused word. I mean, really, wouldn't you like to call most of the people who have somehow loused up this fine planet of ours, "vermin?" It sure describes them perfectly. And then, I think, they should wear pointy little vermin ears so that they'd be more easily identified. If you take a good close look at pictures of our current "president*," you'll notice that he has little pointy vermin ears.

I just thought it ought to be noted for public record.

That said, if you make a nice muffin and then freeze it, you can thaw it out slowly and it will taste almost as good as the day after you made it.

Another item that just needs to be noted for public record.

Vermin and muffins, two great tastes that taste great together.

*not legally and properly elected.

It's not killing me, but it's not making me happy.

2004-05-21T02:56:00.000-03:00

This was the phrase that I came up with to describe a situation today. In fact, the entire day could be summed up this way. See, I was in New Mexico to shoot a television show. And things weren't going exactly right. So, someone asked me how it was going -- and normally that's when you say "fine" or "okay" or "not so good" or whatever. But, things were in that murky gray territory where you're not quite fine, but your not in bad shape. So, I said, "Well, it's not killing me, but it's not making me happy, either." And my coworkers decided that this should be our new company motto.

Oh, and some other things happened today, too, but I must admit that I can't wait to get back home.

Beware of Fire Ants

2004-05-20T01:09:00.000-03:00

Apparently, Google creates ads in the upper part of the page related to words I put in this box. Or something like that. Like, if I constantly refer to MILKSHAKES and the wonder of EGG CREAMS and possibly the insidious nature of PUMPKIN STEW and MOLASSES OATMEAL SANDALS. Well, that should be an interesting advertising campaign, indeed.

Of course, I could just be drawing the wrong pumpkin pumpkin pumpkin pumpkin conclusions about this blog thing. Or maybe milkshake milkshake milkshake milkshake not.

I suppose we shall see.

Today, in New Mexico -- I walked very close to a huge fire ant nest. They tend to swarm a lot. It's actually kind of disturbing because it reminds me of capitalism. Or, more figuratively, the Bush administration. Actually, it doesn't remind me at all about them. But I'm in one of the "red" states (thus, the preponderance of "fire ants"), and even the handful of people I talk to seem to be against his policies. What group in this country does a policy of blind spending and utter and complete disregard for human rights cater to? Beverly Hills dentists?

I bet you were wondering how any of this aligns with fire ants. Well, it doesn't. Sometimes, blogs are just that way. Tough.

New Mexico Rantings

2004-05-19T02:09:00.000-03:00

Okay, so I'm in New Mexico and I learn, to my chagrin, the following interesting and possibly amusing factoids:
1. New Mexico (Albuquerque, I believe) is the DWI capital of the world. I'm unclear as to whether that means number of stops or number of fatalities. I was told fatalities.
2. Occasionally, a snake will fall out of a tree and land on you. If it's a bull snake, don't worry. They're friendly. Watch out for the rattlers, though.
3. The gift basket people here will not try to sell you the more expensive basket, even if you ask for it by name. In fact, they will attempt to dissuade you from parting with your extra $5.
4. Also, possums. They fall out of trees. Watch out for them, too.

That's all the interesting tidbits that I learned today about New Mexico. That, and sopapillas are truly a wonderful, fattening thing. I will not need to eat for the next 3 days.