More Words

Here Goes...

2011-01-02T18:48:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I was on the street corner, loaded down by Trader Joe's bags (such shopping trips are probably hampering my ability to ever have children one day but...a girl needs her half-priced Gouda) feverishly waiting for the walking man to light up so I could cross to the subway stop and get on the hipster train home. Impatience got the better of me and I decided to f!@k the man, the walking man, and bait death by sprinting to the other side of 3rd Avenue. But as I made for my wholly unnecessary getaway I was almost side swiped by a car. (There's a lesson in here somewhere, make peace with waiting especially if you've done heavy grocery shopping). As I spun back to the sidewalk I wound up by a like-minded gentleman who was cursing the drivers: another fellow warrior in the unspoken war between pedestrians and drivers that plays itself out every day in every big City everywhere. We got to talking, in that small talk kind of way one does with a total stranger after a near death experience and it turns out that he was a psychic. Suddenly, like Dustin Hoffman's character in 'Rain Man' "1214, 1214 Matchsticks" he began autistic-like asking me questions one of which was "Do you write?", "Do you write?" to which I mumbled "sometimes" (by which I mean I update my status on Facebook regularly and then he spat out that "I should write" because he was picking up a psychic read from me that I could be very successful at it). I am not so sure that's true and I was raised to believe psychics are hokum peddlers so I will keep my dreams of being signed to Random House at bay but...it seemed like a good enough reason as any to put words to screen once more and open my slambook to the occasionally curious passerby(s). Plus, it's a new year and I made it to the other side.

My America

2009-09-20T18:58:00.000-07:00

I started volunteering recently for a number of reasons, mostly selfish which is funny considering that volunteering is supposed to be about devoting oneself to the service of another but, I think, in my case, perhaps, it's really in the service of myself. I am doing it in part because I tend to complain bitterly and without impunity about the state of things. If I had any money at all, I suppose I would give it away but, instead, I just have time so I am putting in my hours. I figure for each complaint and/or liberal rant I need to do a few hours changing the world albeit in a hyper-local rather small and personal way which, you quickly come to realize, is the way most us can really affect any kind of change unless you are an RFK or MLKjr or a Cindy Sheehan. The bottom line: I got sick of online activism because I think it might be the ultimate coward's way out. How many Move On petitions can you sign in a lifetime?

At any rate, it's been interesting, illuminating, and, yes, heartening thus far. This weekend was my favorite: I read to kids in a homeless shelter which makes it sound very dramatic and very bleeding heart indeed, but it was all pretty normal. No "Gangsta's Paradise" scenario more like working in a regular (read: middle to upper middle class, white) daycare. The kids were dropped off in the playroom/daycare and the volunteers,us - meaning me, were there to greet them and facilitate the day. We got introduced, it was a little awkward at first, what with them meeting us and us meeting them and what with us being adults and with them being kids. But eventually it dissipated and the usual kid/adult cha-cha-cha began. You know the one, right? When you realize that all children are basically anarchists and you, as an adult are policemen, jailer and lawyer? Basically, their thin blue line. After our introductions were made and we had gotten a little more familiar we walked them over to the library and read to them and then we took them to the park. The kids were cute, man, were they cute and well-behaved and, in spite, of all the treacherous shit they must see (or maybe not - who knows? Povery, in this case homelessness, doesn't mean bad parenting necessarily, does it? Maybe, somewhere along the line, I bought into the notion that wealth, or cul-de-sacs means more love but that's hogwash. Just look around you)...

I was surprised or I have been in doing the volunteering by

a) It's amazing how many people come out and give up their time and do something for others no matter how selfish or not the intent is (see the above i.e. "is there anything such as true altruism? Or is it all an extension of the ego and, perhaps, even more so because it is cloaked in righteousness?").

and

b) I have been doing this for a few weeks with a secular volunteer organization that works with non-profits in the City and, so far, many of the things I have done have been, in large part, organized by churches which has been interesting to realize. I hang out with a Godless crowd - folks smart enough to think they know better than to need religion with all its false and manipulative comforts and,quite honestly, I feel that way about it too. Truth is, I don't feel "him" and never will. I was born, basically, an atheist with a dash of agnostic throw in for humility's sake. Still, I am just not willing to summarily write organized religion off as all hideously evil. I have a few friends whose hatred for religion is so deep they cannot see or bear to see any of its good points. The abolitionists were deeply religious and henceforth, in this country, almost every civil rights movement started in the pews. I suppose it helps to have God, even if he's fictional, on your side when you are going up against the Goliaths especially if they are violent, chagrined bigots or, even worse, state sanctioned law.

At any rate, I am getting off on a tangent, per usual, but my essential point is that the good works element of the Churh is alive and well (along with all the heinous nasty shit they do too) which has, for a secularist like me, been interesting and humbling to witness especially since I tend to write off anyone who proclaims themselves a Christian to be...a loon. These past few weeks have taught me that those loons often take care of many of the neediest in this society for better or for worse (this is probably a by-product of the hostility towards government that exists... People are suspicious if not downright angry about the state caring for its citizens but less so about Jesus doing so).

I am just glad someone cares be it an unemployed ad men (who I met recently), a lifelong parishioner, or an Upper West Side denizen even if the "giving back" is more often for the giver than the recipient.

Status Anxiety

2009-09-07T06:32:00.000-07:00

It's been a rough Summer. Spring was just a preview. I think there are a few reasons for this and one is, of course, that I am getting older. And, I find myself struggling with the image of my life or what I thought it would be, versus the reality of my life. Perhaps, this comes from being a part of a generation that was told to do whatever made me "happy"...? Post-boomers, we must be one of the first generations in history who live in pursuit of this ephemeral notion. At the same time we are pursuing whatever makes us "happy" is that it is becoming harder and harder to get by (I am talking facts and figure - middle-class bill paying type of thing). I don't think this makes me a Molotov-throwing class warrior or whiner for pointing this out.

And, to that end, I could not help but be dismayed at the tenor of political discourse this summer. It was easy to hope or think (or maybe fool oneself) into thinking when Obama got elected, that there would be a return to seriousness. The forces of right-wing derangement that were unleashed and danced on the national stage during the Bush years would have been beaten back and retreated into the shadows for at least a year or two to plot their next single-issue voter campaigns for the next elections. But, no. We've had to endure a season of red-faced screaming over health care which, to me, is obviously just an excuse to rage over the shifting racial demographics and the tenuous grasp on power whites hold in this country in the foreseeable future. Less fear of death panels and more fear of a black planet.

But, now the Fall is coming and oddly enough or not, I see it more as a time for renewal than summer. I am sensing rebirth here even as the leaves begin to crack and turn dry. Obama addresses Congress on Weds and I am hopeful that he is going to fight in the spirit of Teddy Kennedy's legacy of noblesse oblige. The only truly civil society is one that takes care of its weakest members. Personally, I am girding my loins too to be brave and hopeful and disciplined in my own life. To continue, I suppose, to pursue that always allusive, sometime happiness and to remember to recognize what a privilige it is to be able to do so.

Eternal Spring

2009-04-30T14:42:00.001-07:00

Last weekend, New York was treated to a premature summer. Such a dramatic burst of heat (and dry heat, mind you, not humid, like it’d been imported from the California desert or something with just enough faint Santa Ana-like winds for it to feel haunting) that before you knew it the City was in full-summer sensuality mode. Walking around the streets, you couldn’t help but be struck by the endless carnival of human beauty: one gorgeous, expertly-coiffed, fat-free, cocoa-buttered person after another strolling by seemingly unencumbered by anything but the care of their own good looks. It was hard not to stare, it was hard not to feel like some kind of combination of troll and vampire, it was hard not to feel titillated and not worthy at the same time, it was hard not to feel pained somehow by the beauty as far as the squinting eye could see, it was hard not to enjoy it but feel hollow in the too early summer sun as part of you wished you still had a parka to hide all your failures and dashed expectations under.

Everyone talks about winter being the difficult season but after this weekend that gave me pause, maybe its spring. It dawned on me that to be faced with another renaissance, another renewal, another rebirth was to be confronted with the realization that your springs are not eternal (to embrace a cliché), and that difficult recognition unleashes an exquisite panic. You know the one, right? It’s the “life is passing me by”/ “What is this existence, this life thing?” anxiety. Or as Diana Ross, the ultimate Supreme, sang to herself in Mahogany “Do you know where you’re going to, do you like the things that life is showing you, where are you going to, do you know?” Skin barred, sun blazing, green buds sprouting, winter weather long gone and the natural obstacle of cold weather no longer a factor in the daily struggle, the answer seemed to be “FUCK NO”!

The weather in the City has returned to its normal 60-degree type spring fare. Summer has been temporarily staved off and jackets and boots are back on but we all know that it won’t be long till the halter tops are de-rigueur and the Greek Gods come out from under their sweaters to parade the streets with us mortals. The smallness of my life will, no doubt, be all too readily illuminated by the summer sun but by then the humidity will have kicked in and we’ll all be sweating - a reminder that perfection, like spring, is hardly eternal and as Shakespeare might have said, sweating his balls off on the streets of Manhattan under thousands of heat blowing air-conditioners “conscience doth make cowards of us all.” Conscience might not but spring in New York certainly does.

Diminished Returns

2009-04-05T08:46:00.000-07:00

In the months since I last posted (months, I tell ya, months) the American financial system has undergone the equivalent of a heart transplant. I happen to live in the place where its undergone surgery. In other words, I live in the rotten heart -- New York City. It's been a strange few months, to say the least. On the one hand, 2009 started out with this kind-of glorious optimism: the end of 8 years of unimaginable Bush era malaise, mendacity and mediocrity and the beginning of the Obama years. His inaguration day seemed like something out of a fiction, a mixture of extreme promise and hopefulness and sheer relief: it felt like the war had ended and all that was missing was a ticker-tape parade and a sailor kissing a girl on a corner.

Well, the fiction has ended now and the reality has set in and we have to trudge, slog, or as Churchill said, "muddle through" what everyone is calling "the new hard times". I am part of a generation that is not the "muddle through" kind. Again, I know I speak to a particular class and, to an extent, race. Most of my friends were not born in extreme poverty, the kind that has to muddle through no matter what returns their parents are getting on their 401k's because their parents never had them to begin with.

I am fortunate enough to have a day job right now which I am grateful for while at the same time resenting which is an odd juxtaposition. I have an ego and ambition, I imagine for myself a fully creative life one day that is not subject to performing administrative duties for others, for pay. But, all around me I have friends who are unemployed, getting laid off, borrowing money from parents and now they are forced to wait. All the while, we tell ourselves and each other that this is only temporary, because deep down despite our cultivated disaffectation, we feverishly believe or hope that the American Dream, as it were, is just laying dormant right now, and that, we too, will be rewarded for working hard, if and when the chance to do so comes back.

On Loving not Hating New York.

2008-11-23T21:53:00.001-08:00

Living in New York can be like a badge of honor for some: an occupation almost. As if in response to the question "what do you do?" (always a favorite of mine because it comes with a lot of qualifiers: "I'm an actress,er, with a day-job but, no an artist, and no I don't always get paid for it, and, and, and...blech") they can answer "I live in New York". Being a resident of this City is a job, never mind the actual job. I often describe living here as Darwinian which I don't think is original or a stretch to say by any means though recently in describing it as such I did elicit a quizzical look from someone (who lives in L.A. - go figure). After you've been here a while you realize that, for better or worse, much of the rest of the world disappears into a hazy fog of "out there". I don't particularly care for the all-consuming tunnel vision that comes from living here but unless you are wealthy and have a country house or thousands of frequent flier miles the rest of the world becomes something you visit after a 4 hour Greyhound bus ride.

I would say that I have more of a love affair with this City than a love/hate relationship with it (though I do have days when I am felled by the daily challenges: waiting for the subway which is rapidly, almost shockingly, decaying with every passing year, tromping to and fro for even the most basic of middle class amenities, groceries, laundry, and don't even THINK about a car). Though I didn't grow up in the American suburbs my parents eventually did retire there. I am always shocked at how, well, contained life is in their development. How little contact there is with, well, the outside world funnily enough. My parents can go for days, if they so choose, just seeing each other and the good people who work at the Food Lion. They are older and spent 40 years traveling around the world (my Father was in the foreign service and his first post was Senegal and his last was Switzerland and in-between there were stints in Paris, and Rio and Hong Kong so these people have, you know, lived and seen a lot of shit and met a lot of people both paupers and princes)... which is to say that this is by no means a judgment call, at all.

Still it is, I suppose a comparison.

What I think I love about New York in contrast, to say, the cul-de-sac in which my parents are living out their golden years is the fact that there is no escaping the humanity and, by extension, the humility of being one of many. Butting up against these life stories, this constant throbbing mosaic of urban life, its ugliness, its beauty, its millions of triumphs and bitter disappointments. The fact that you can feel beautiful one minute and with just the opening door of a subway as ten women better dressed, more beautiful, taller - definitely taller- breeze in and sweep past, instantly humbled. For a drama lover there is nothing better than the endless mini-series of human storytelling that is perpetually being played out by 14 million of us against the indifferent steel and chrome, the City.

The Joyless Jazz Age (2000-2008, R.I.P).

2008-10-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all.

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, from Echoes Of The Jazz Age (Nov. 1931)

Well, here we are less than five days away from a major political realignment. The nightmare of the Bush years and the dreams of a 50-year Republican majority might meet their final resting place next Tuesday. Barring the capture of Bin Laden by John McCain, nay, Todd Palin in the rocky border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and a 2000-point rise in the Dow, I am going to go out on a limb and say we are about to witness a massive regime change.

Even if Obama turns out to be some magical combination of Lincoln, FDR and Clinton, I still think we are in for a rough ride here in this United, divided, States. The past 8 years have been horrifying and the ugly lights are coming on after a long night of very tawdry, destructive, partying. In the morning we will awake to a legacy of illegal war, torture and a seemingly insurmountable avalanche of debt. I am just regurgitating the cliché that this really is a “perfect storm”. Just when the government needs to follow the Keynesian model of “pumping the well” there is no, uh, you know, liquid left to do so.

Also, I am curious to see how a nation whose culture is so bound to consumerism does when identity cannot be bought with a credit card. People are tribal and I have long argued that part of our democratic pluralism has been bound to our ability to distract and buy (I think this comes with the death of religion, maybe?). This is not earth shattering analysis here but I fear we could witness some massive civilian violence.

Or not.

Perhaps, the culture is going to experience the kind of contraction that many of us felt was and is needed. By contraction, I think I mean the end of, what I called, “The Joyless Jazz age”. The years when “Sex and The City” became a major cultural touchstone and Paris Hilton, for better or worse, was so dominant a cultural force that love her or hate her you couldn’t ignore her. The years when, despite a war that was draining our resources the only people truly appalled enough to do anything radical about it were over the age of forty: a mother named Cindy Sheehan and some upper West Side Grandmothers, Code Pink. The years when three hundred channels of cable spewed “To Catch a Predator” and “Cribs”, “The Hills” and “The Swan”, “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”, and “The Biggest Loser”, “American Idol” and “The Littlest Groom”.

The Joyless Jazz Age is over and not a moment too soon. Let’s pray (as only a secularists can) that its replacement is not nearly as gruesome.

I’m hopeful but I might be giving away my television and buying a shotgun just in case…

American Pyscho (or what would Susan Sontag think?)

2008-08-10T08:42:00.000-07:00

Not one to miss out on the cultural zeitgeist (if there is such a thing anymore) I went a few weeks ago one hot summer afternoon to see Batman, oh I'm sorry "The Dark Knight". It's always a relief to escape into a Dionysian-like stadium of air-conditioning and Laz-ee boy seats in the summer to watch a major motion picture and "Knight" certainly qualifies. It's been hard to escape the media blitz surrounding this film in large part because of the infotainment media (and, the public's?) ghoulish fascination with the death of Heath Ledger. The semi-glee with which entertainment reporters asked the cast members of this movie about "Heath" (a true testament of super fame is when you just become one word, "Madonna", "Jesus", "Nike", "Brangelina", "Heath") was discomfiting at best. One couldn't help but wonder if James Dean had it right all along? I thought of him and his motto of live fast, die young, leave behind a beautiful corpse every time I saw yet another poster of the Jihadi Joker staring out from the side of a building.

The film is all it promises to be: a dark, rollicking, action packed, thrill-a-minute ride but I couldn't help but find it a nasty piece of work. I agree with cultural theorists who say that no art is ever made in a vacuum (and if it is, it's usually pretty awful) and this picture, in particular, seems to feed on the queasy paranoia and fears of this surreal era. In some ways, it's a perfect parable of the Bush years but I found it hard to tell if the filmmaker wanted me to root or hiss for Batman. Still for better or worse, the anti-hero is still a hero. So our hero is Bruce Wayne, a billionaire vigilante willing to go to questionable lengths to keep the citizens of Gotham safe. The storyline infers that he has to because the government, the justice department and the local police force are too corrupt and incompetent to do the job. Even the new hotshot D.A, Harvey Dent, with his Spitzer and RFK-like intensity is no match-up for the sheer dementia of the Jihadi Joker. There are refrains of Dick Cheney's "you gotta go to the dark side" because the rule of law is a thing of the past, monsters have to be dealt with accordingly and to deal with one, you must become one in this cinematic fairy tale. Plus the scenes of catastrophe that thuddingly unfold one after another is this film and the mangled response of the police in particular hits a little too close to home. The view of government as essentially useless should be disturbingly familiar as it's been the prevailing philosophy of our ruling party. There were moments, in the film that I couldn't help but think of Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism". Granted, this particular billionaire, Bruce Wayne's private security apparatus is altruistic in nature (he's out to protect the innocent and his hot ex-girlfriend) unlike the super rich that Klein describes in her book who pay for services that they think will keep them safe, everyone else be damned.

The flipside of this is that "Batman", err, Mike Bloomberg, no sorry, um, Bruce Wayne aka the Dark Knight is not bound to follow any rules or any laws, for that matter. He can go to a foreign country and abduct escaped criminals (remember when the CIA went to Italy and threw "the bad guys" into blacked out vans and they were transported to secret prisons?). In this case, our man, Batman, flies into Hong Kong under cover of night to get a ruthless accountant who is, of course, Chinese! I love that bit of casting which feeds into our western paranoia that the Chinese are taking all our money and have no morals or ethics. Movie villains are nothing if not a reflection of a culture's xenophobia. As the movie climaxes and the Jihadi Joker constructs greater and greater theater of destruction our hero is forced to take action and use his superior technology to spy on all 31 million of Gotham's citizens. Even this action disturbs his moral conscience, a trusted adviser played by one Morgan Freeman. Poor Morgan Freeman, ever since the Shawshank Redemption he has been doomed to play a thin facsimile of Nelson Mandela in almost every movie he has been cast in i.e. a black Saint with no real purpose other than to be a foil for the white guy's tolerance and goodness. (He must be a hero since he's got Morgan Freeman on his side!). Ultimately, Batman's invasion of people's privacy does have its consequences and Nelson Mandela resigns but it also has its rewards: it leads Batman to the Joker. The lesson here: spying might be questionable, kids, but in times like these, clock ticking, it's also a necessity. Holy Peepers Batman!

After two and a half, admittedly, expertly paced hours of sociopathic, sadistic scenes of destruction, I had, had enough. I can appreciate the skill of the filmmaking and some of performances and, yes, I am talking mainly about Heather Ledger who actually infuses his character with deeply grounded pathos - think Commedia delle Arte meets method - but utterly believable! You know: acting. Unlike Christian Bale, who plays it so by the book, gravelly voice (check), stiff upper chest (check), faraway stares (check), he comes off as utterly one dimensional which is fine, it's a comic book character. But, he's also a humorless snooze which becomes tiresome after two hours as does watching endless scenes of destruction. I was ready to get out of the Laz-ee boy seats and return to the hot, muggy streets after the Joker blows up a hospital. I know the filmmaker posits that the Joker simply wants to see "the world burn" but it's hard to watch this blockbuster if you actually read and consume news regularly: the world is burning. Lastly, for years, I have been regularly forced to hear Western neo-cons whinge on endlessly about the jihadi "worship of death" but as I watched "the Dark Knight" I had to wonder if, we really have any right to lecture anyone about civilization and democracy when this is the entertainment we eagerly make, celebrate and consume.

Things On My Mind.

2008-06-27T06:48:00.000-07:00

A random, somewhat disparate, collection of t'ings I been t'inkin' about.

In no particular order...

Zimbabwe: Wow. I've been listening to a lot of news stories about this (the scary side effect of streaming NPR all day at an office job). But, seriously, it's like "The Last King of Scotland" all over again only this time, lets substitute Mugabe for Idi Amin. You forget how precious it is to be able to vote without getting petrol fuel poured on you because you dare to support the opposition. Our democracy is fragile (and it's been beaten to shit over the past 8 years) but we face none of the terror (yes, terror) that these people are facing right now. Beware the strong man of Africa... the nasty, lingering effects of colonialsim? Maybe.

The Gun Ban-Ban or the 2nd Amendment ruling or Why our Supreme Court can kiss my M@#tha-f!#@$g ass: Any hardened Hillary Clinton supporter need only take one look at this decision and consider John McCain's statement that he wants a court full of Roberts and Scalias and Thomases. This decision is a nightmare. The idea that the framers wanted every American to have a Glock in their home is lunacy. We have a standing army and no one's trying to overthrow the King. The constitution's genius is that it's malleable and the notion that our laws should ahere more to the realities of 1776 than 2008 is, in a word, assinine.

Wanted: The new Angelina Jolie movie. God, it looks awful but I love James McAvoy so much (yet another "Last King of Scotland" reference). Word is that it's despicably violent which I find curious given Ms. Jolie's reputation as a global humanitarian....I guess I find it odd that someone so concerned about the plight of refugees (usually fleeing their country because someone is out to the kill them and their entire family) would then turn and make a film that gratituitiously gorges itself on violence. Not to get too Tipper Gore circa 1987 on your ass, I do believe there is a correleation between what we are seeing and what we are doing... Count me among the moral majority. Hmmm, is this just an uneasy combo of art and activism?

Gallery Hopping in Chelsea: I am. Tomorrow. Going gallery-hopping. Taking my New Yorker and doing the art walk. I will report on the state of contemporary art on Monday. I am mildly hopeful.

Adventure: I am dying for it. I am in-between shows and this is never a good thing because then I have time to think (hence Rodin's penseur) and the wanderlust really creeps in. Not creeps so much as slaps me against the face and, like a devil, takes over my body, exorcism-style. I long for bigger and better things, dramatic, novel-like adventures like being a war correspondant or working for "Doctors without Borders" or, closer to home, engaging in, for me, debauchorous, unhealthy, behavior... In short, I become petulant and teenage.

Pity the individual with a romantic sensibility (I do).

Staples makes me sad.

2008-06-09T15:14:00.000-07:00

I couldn't tell you why but I have had this odd prediliction since I was a child. A strange sensitivity almost or maybe I am just trying to dress up my affection for being maudlin or my fondness for being blue.

Shopping in Staples makes me sad.

Sometimes shopping in a Duane Reade brings on a similiar melancholy (I sound like the Edgar Allan Poe of Strip Malls) but for some reason not as bad...maybe the make-up section still makes it seem....fun.

Staples though brings home alienation to me and 21st century class structures and makes them manifest. I am almost always shopping there because I've been sent on a duck-duck-goose run for labels for some temp job I'm at. Everyone in there is usually some kind of business person or, rather, the underling of a business person looking mildly annoyed as they search for the "sign here" labels or "toner cartridges" while "Steely Dan" plays overhead. The workers are all in uniform and are usually very nice to whatever asshole they are dealing with. In those moments searching aisle five for "poster-board spray adhesive" all the Nietchszean-style nihilistic thoughts, all the suspicion of modernity comes flooding in and it's like "this, this is progress"? Maybe, I should move to Oregon, get a bow and arrow, and eat with my hands.

But, instead I pick up whatever I've been sent for, get in line, and fully wallow in the utter sadness that is part of the contract you sign when you are brought into this world.

Now that wasn't easy.

TRANSFERENCE

2008-06-05T14:28:00.000-07:00

Transference

I am thrilled that he won the nomination. Obama, of course.

Side note: I don’t want my 30 days of continuous blogging to turn into a watery regurgitation of what I’ve heard on NPR. But, in truth, politics is always on my mind to some degree or another. Or maybe it’s not politics but culture, the big picture, what’s happening locally, globally and how are my fellow, human-being-animals reacting to it? Chalk it up to A LOT of history classes in college. I don’t entirely understand people who proudly announce that they’ve got no interest in politics (again, for me, politcs = big picture). To me, this is like proudly announcing that you’ve got no interest in art?! Curiosity is currency and it should extend to all avenues of life, no? Wow. I am in danger of sounding like an Generation X Dear Abby.. But, really, really, isn’t it all so fascinating? All of it, life, culture, people, art, and that includes politics (again politics = BIG PICTURE).

We are, of course, in a verrrrry interesting political period here in these United States and the hope (yes, it’s a corny word but for lack of a better word, hope but I use it with a caveat: it’s DESPERATE hope), the desperate hope this primary season has produced is palatable. The desire for, yes, here’s that other word again: change. And, for better or worse, vast numbers of the American populace (and the world apparently judging from the headlines fom the rest of the globe) have rested their hopes firmly upon the sinewy shoulders of one Barack Obama. Who, I note, have noted, and will say again: I love. And yet, ahhh the inevitable “but”, I am mildly weary of the degree to which there seems to be some mass kind of transference happening between him and the people, as it were. The pinning of all of ones’ (here’s that word again) hopes on one person to me seems a little frightening, frankly. . To me, there seems to be a desire of so many of us to see this one person, a man (a human man, it should be noted) Obama to absolve us, the American people, of the sins of the past 8 years. As if his presidency would prove to us, once again, that we are indeed the country of tolerance and openness and reinvention and truth and justice and not the land of Guantanemo, and Katrina and foreclosures and Iraq and Abu-Gahrib and utter indifference to all of the aforementioned.

Maybe I should just relish in this moment and in the fact that for now, for this instance in my still relatively young lifetime, I feel that history is not static and that progress is tangible and not just read about in the Chapter on the Sixties in that high school textbook. Maybe I should let my eyes well up with tears every time Obama talks about the “fierce urgency of now” and forget about the pandering speech he just made to AIPAC (just one day after he got the nomination it should be noted) declaring Jerusalem off-limits to the Palestinians.

See? Human being in a very corrupt system. I still love him but, deep down, I know that anyone, and I mean anyone, who is about to touch that much power is bound to disappoint.

It’s part of a noble tradition.

30 (continuous) Days of Blogging

2008-06-05T13:33:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to inject my life with discipline, rigor, and Victorian self-improvement I am committing myself to 30 days of blogging.

Who's keeping score? No one!

Like Van Gogh painting for an audience that never came (save Theo) the joy will be in the doing. Or not. (Insert tired anecdote here about Vinnie's ear getting cut off though, apparently, it is now in heated dispute whether or not Van Gogh cut off his own hearing device or if Gaugin did it while they were both in the throes of an alchoholic infused night out on the town).

I feverishly hope, of course, that someone will stay tuned from now until the middle of July as I record my wry, ever-so-slightly vulnerable observations on living in the surreal life of the 21st Century.

Oh dear, what the hell do I have to say that is not on Gawker or the Huffington Post?

Stay tuned...

OBSESSION (It's not just a perfume from the 80's)

2008-03-04T18:38:00.000-08:00

I, am, clearly ambivalent about blogging or just lazy (I cop to both) since I have been seriously deliquent about keeping this updated. Chalk it up to watching too much of "The Wire" which I am, yes, frighteningly obsessed with. I don't care if this makes me the hundredth hipster (and ONLY by virtue of my zip-code) to spout off on how "ammmmaaazzinnnng" the show is. It is. Amazing, that is. Plus, I feel a certain loyalty to any show that centers around the underbelly of America especially if that underbelly is located squarely in the heart of Baltimore, Maryland. (A place I know well: I went to college there, came of age there, fell in love hard for the first time there, and, lastly, was mugged three times, twice by gunpoint, there). Watching it is just a welcome back to Balmore hon'. Baltimore has a lot of charm but the City has been, more or less, ravaged by the loss of its manufacturing centers and what rose up to replace it: a drug trade with customer loyalty and profits that any Captain of Industry would envy. The show is in essence a treatise on moral relativism in an era of decay. David Simon (who I have now read a lot about in truly obsessive/pyschofantic fashion) says he was inspired by the Greek dramatists notion of fate i.e. instead of the Gods failing man it's now institutions (government, school, press) who randomly abandon and thus, destroy it's constituients no matter how good, how promising, how worthy they may be).

It's odd to have "The Wire" looming large in the background of my thinking these days. Seriously, I'm obsessed and this has to do as much with the compelling themes, the fantastic writing and the terrific acting. Seeing genuine journeymen actors (none of whom looked botoxed or underfed) chew the dialogue and tear up the storylines with relish is thrilling. At any rate, it's a curious thing to be bouncing back and forth between watching "The Wire" while indulging in my other obsession: the Democratic Primary. There's been a lot of ink spilled about how historic, blah-de-blah, it's all been and it has and it is. And, I will readily admit that my love of Obama seemingly knows no bounds. As Hendrik Hertzberg wrote "he's got Bobby Kennedy's heat and Jack's cool" so what's not to love? All things being relative and knowing that no matter what platitudes these pols spout to get elected most of it will remain just that: a platitude. "Change" is as amorphous as "faith" but I don't care, I'll take false hope over no hope while I can.

Nonetheless, there is something jarring about watching "The Wire" with its vivid and stark view of the rotted and decaying American-Every- City and then hear the candidates wax on about America's greatness, our military prowess, our vast potential... For many of us who have lived or are living in these parts of urban America know that there are entire pockets of this country where the violence and poverty rival most third world nations. John Edwards hinted at this but Obama's promise of one America was ultimately more seductive than being reminded that there were two America's. I fell for it too. Maybe I fell for Obama's One America because it makes me feel better about abandoning that other America. I watch the other America on "The Wire" from my apartment in Brooklyn (David Simon calls New York City "a pile of money") - I watch it struggle and gasp from the safe distance of my couch. Then in the morning I turn on NPR in hopes that I might catch a snippet of Obama's speech at some rally to make me feel better about America ( One and Two).

Female Liberation?

2008-01-05T18:11:00.000-08:00

2007 was a great year for me in many regards even if I made enough to put me solidly on the poverty line. I did eight shows (count 'em 8 shows) last year and got paid for... one of them! In the process, I met some amazing new people, people that I came to New York to met: actors, and playwrights, and directors, and just general artist/dilletante-types. I ended the year with a kind of faith that, hell yes, I am struggling and I might, like the grasshopper, have nothing for the eventual winter of my life so to speak but nevermind; I am here now and making work and doing it with wickedly talented, sincere, sharp, funny people who are all sacrificing to be creative.

2008 has started out with a slight bump and I am about to do something that, honestly, I rarely do on this blog - confess. Believe it or not, I seldom use this as a public journal. But here goes -- I recently had an experience with a guy, who shall heretoforth go unnamed, and it reminded me of why, sometimes, I really despise the prevailing dynamic between (straight) men and women that exists in this particular time and place, especially in this City. Simply put, there seems to be a kind of reversal of any gains that were made during the sexual revolution or during the women's movement. (The latter especially is in tatters. The Onion recently had an article with the headline "Man Put in Charge of Ailing Feminist Movement" and it was the funniest thing in the paper). My example of this is dating in New York which is, in my experience, more like something out of a Jane Austen novel than, say, an episode of "Sex in the City" (a show which to me has about as much to do with my life as a woman in New York as "Gossip Girl"). Maybe this has to do with a 5 to 1 female to male ratio? Plus, as far as I can tell, being single is seen as some sort of major personal failure. I almost dread being asked the question "are you dating anyone?" as much as "what do you do?" Both being pre-cursors of judgement i.e. " are you successful? are you desired? and depending on the answers to those: are you worth getting to know?"

My latest experience hooking up and then attempting to have (a) date has not been great and I have sought out and received so much conflicting advice from friends it's made my head spin. The advice, usually, comes in two forms, the most prevelant is: don't make the first move - ever. You have to be pursued, there is a biological, evolutionary, model at work - woe to you if you mess with the hunter-gatherer paradigm of male/female relationships. You must be the Diana of this urban-myth so run and he will chase; if he doesn't chase then, yes, he's "just not that into you" (this turns out to, generally, be my experience). The other advice is, of course, the direct opposite and goes something like: "be aggressive, take control, it's sexy."

Armed with this information, the dance begins and is usually a tiresome series of emails that reveal, once again, that all relationships boil down to a power-play. I hate this. I find it annoying and incredibly, yes, tiresome. I loathe the inherent inequality - the game of figuring who holds the cards. I don't know why I would expect anything else though since we are just taking the model of what we've grown up with and feeding it into our own lives. Equality especially in personal relationships takes a lot of communication and a lot of honesty and, sadly, I find most guys especially most American guys just do not have enough genuine curiousity about another person for this to happen. I am shocked at how conversations usually develop between men and women - the woman asks questions all night, listens and then comments appreciatevely at the answers she hears from the man. As far as I can tell the "healthiest" most functional relationships I see are very often same-sex. I wonder if this is because by already subverting the expected cultural-norm/model it frees two people up to engage on a more level playing field as equals from the get-go? Am I generalizing? Probably. Is some of what I've just written bullshit? Absolutely. Is some of it true? Without a doubt.

I don't know where I am going with this and I am fearful that this is quickly turning into one quasi-academic, half-bakked theory on relationships or, in my case, the lack therof.

Pakistan on my Mind.

2007-12-28T08:38:00.000-08:00

I found out that Benazir Bhutto had been assisinated in, of all places, the elevator. The news flashed on one of those "captivision" televisions that are de-riguer in most high-end office buildings. I mean, god forbid, we just be in an elevator sans stimuli. I gasped and I am still gasping at the news and the photographs of (even more) turmoil that have been unleashed in that part of the world. I read about it all day yesterday, her life as the offspring of a powerful and aristocratic Kennedy-esque (by way of Pakistan) family. The streak of tragedy and corruption that ran through her life. She sounded supremely flawed, like all leaders, and, of course, terrifyingly brave almost like a character out of a novel. I read that her minders didn't want her to go into the crowd and expose herself but she was apparently unfazed and bullheaded about addressing her supporters in the flesh, so to speak. It never ceases to amaze me how almost all human beings are capable of such extreme acts of courage and cowardice.

Of course, the U.S. news is focused on how all of this will affect the "Global War on Terror". I really wish that phrase would stop being printed and repeated. It's so laughably Orwellian and utterly meaningless; an advertising slogan not a policy and printing it gives it credibility. At any rate, I did remind me how, by comparison, life here seems so, well, placid. The past (nearly) eight years of governance have been so awful and the response, by and large, has been so utterly tepid, defeated almost. I am not, by any means, suggesting that turmoil is a sign of a healthy civic life but our culture seems like it's at the almost opposite end of the extreme. I sometimes look around at my peers, my friends, and, well, myself and am reminded of that frog in boiling water metaphor/analogy i.e. put the frogs in cold water and they won't jump out, slowly boil the water and the frogs won't realize that anything is wrong until they are floating on top i.e there will be no trouble closing the lid.

Well, that's dark...maybe too dark and it is an election year afterall. And, perhaps, the extreme cultural/political amnesia we've experienced these past eight years will begin to wear off and the great American mass will realize that if they don't act now, events like the ones happenning in Pakistan - corruption, military rule, quasi-dictatorship, phony elections, politics for keeps - will become a daily reality here too.

Home

2007-11-22T12:02:00.000-08:00

"Home" I am vaguely obsessed with the concept, now that we've started asking questions about what that is, or what that means to people and, interestingly, how many times when the question is asked how torn or unsure most reponses are. And, to that end, I took the Greyhound Bus (to me an American icon of a bygone era). I get on it and immeadiately start thinking of that Simon and Garfunkel song that has that refrain "Kathy I said as we boarded the greyhound in Pittsburgh, I'm empty and aching and I don't know why, it took me four days to hitchhike to Saganau, I've come to look for A...MMMM...EEEE...RRRR....IIII....CCCC....AAAA".. And, the Port Authority is quite an experience the day before the most travelled holiday of the year, Thanksgiving. I had the offensive thought as I joined the many feets-long line and began the process of waiting to get on a seriously overbooked bus that I knew how it felt to be one of those poor and huddled masses at Ellis island minus, you know, the stakes of a new life and the hope and terror the new arrivals must have felt. The only thing I feel as I stand in the line is something approximating severe irritation.

Finally, we board over an hour past the time that was scheduled. I wonder if somewhere President Bush is clutching his forehead over the bus delays like he did over flight delays but I doubt it, the bus is, mainly, the refuge of the poor - real Americans own cars or take planes.

The Music Industry

2007-09-11T10:24:00.000-07:00

Would this man have stood a chance of getting his videos played on MTV (if he were just starting out and not a bona-fide legend being produced by Trent Reznor)???

Just wondering...

Wander Lust

2007-09-06T13:37:00.000-07:00

Ooooh, I'm in love with travelling again but I was never out of love with travelling but I am often out-of-pocket which is a discreet way of saying: I'm a pauper and travelling is for rich folk or very crafty aid-workers or diplomat types. I grew up travelling so it's in the blood, kid. But, then again, who doesn't have the yen to blow this Taco Stand for places unfamiliar (though, uh, I've mainly been to Western Europe lately so that hardly qualifies as "exotic" or "foreign" even).

I've promised myself that the next trip I pay for (and, luckily, eventhough I've travelled a decent amount these past few years they've mainly been for theater gigs which means: me no pay) Besides, I want to get out of the Western Europe travel vortex. I'm talking whole other continents, people! And to that end, I am putting it in print and on the web in order to make it, somehow, more real and to make myself accountable to my own travel...lust(!).

And so, in no particular order, the top 3:

Vietnam and Cambodia (Does that count as 2?)

Chalk it up to watching "Apocolypse Now, Redux" one too many times... Not really, I have friends who have gone and say that it is astoundingly beautiful and that the people are, surprisingly, warm given that fact that we dropped Napalm on their children only thirty years ago. Oh, being an American is fun, isn't it? I think I am just generally fascinated by countries that have, for better or worse, been irreversably changed by colonialism and the former Indochine certainly falls into that category. Plus, I know this might be lame but...I love vietnamese food! The most delicate and piquant of all asian cooking (mint? lemongrass? vietnamese coffee?!). Plus, a communist/buddhist country with capitalist leanings is worth a visit, no?

PERU!!!!

I am itching to go back to South America though Peru just sufferred a terrible earthquake...but I want to see Machu Pichu before the acid rain washes away the last remnants of the once great Inca empire. Plus (here we go with the food again): cerviche? potatoes with cheese? arroz con pollo? Itchy sweaters and hats with ear flaps? Plus, it's relatively cheap and after spending a month in Europe I need to visit countries where the dollar is still king (or just not almost worthless).

SOUTH AFRICA

Truth and Reconciliation Committee! Nelson Mandela! Home to the next World Cup! Plus, I met a very cool South African in Edinburgh who made his country sound pretty incredible - joyous, beautiful. Again, I've heard it on good authority that it's the kind of place you don't want to leave and the political transformation of South Africa is fascinating. Plus, I've never eaten the food so that alone merits a visit.

Now, I just have to steadily amass a fortune which between temping and acting gigs should be doable in about 30 some-odd years after I give up my apartment and go live with my parents. But I can DREAM and thus make this happen.

Travel or Shrivel!

I saw 24 Plays last Month or some thoughts on Theater (cue the Snoring).

2007-09-04T13:03:00.000-07:00

I saw 24 plays last month or 24 shows or or whatever you want to call them. Some of them were performance "experiences" I guess, but the majority of them were plays. And, dear me, I came away with the thought, that I often have, which goes something like "making a good play is so hard" and "theater is so subjective"... Actually, in a fit of pretension one night I even likened it to proving the existence of God (I was getting all St. Thomas Aquinos on their asses). But...here are a few things I came away with in terms of "what I want to see in when I am sitting in the dark" (ahem).

So without further ado -- Here in, ahhh yes, the always trusty, always reliable, numerical list format

1. A Story

I'm a sucker for a good beginning, middle and end. I am going to throw out all the usual cliches like when I see a play "I want you take me with you" and "bring me on a journey" blah, blah, etc. etc. Serioulsy though, maybe the time for non-linear, deliberately obtuse to the point of incoherence theater/storytelling is over (thank god). I don't want to be spoonfed by any means but from where I am sitting clairty is king. Now, that doesn't mean everything needs to be a clean point A) to point B) but if you want a mess on stage - let me, the audience member, know why. I can't care about your characters or their actions or the world artificially being created in front of me if I don't understand what the f!@#$ is going on and I don't mean in that ambigious Harold Pinter kind of way.

2. Cultural Authenticity

Hmmmmm, this is a tough one and I hestiate to put it out there but..the worst thing I saw at the Fringe was a British play set in the heart of white trash Americana (though they wouldn't have described it that way). Man oh man, was it phoney in the worst possible way - finger wagging, self-righteous which means it was also smug and humorless! Think Lars van Trier movie but not nearly as good (he's never been to the United States either but writes/makes those great DOGMA film allegories about the injustices of the Fat American Empire). For the record, Dancer in the Dark is one of my favorite things...when the dog bites, when the bee stings... But, really, I am not sure I would want to see an American do a play about the chav's who roam the British housing tenements. It's hard enought to write a play that doesn't reduce your own county members to two-dimensional cariactures but it's nearly impossible not to do it when writing about the "other" (especially ones as ubiqioutious and, at times, offensive as Americans). I am not sure what the solution is... Is it to keep theater local just like produce? I dunno but if you are going to take on another country's culture (especially the weakestmembers among them) make sure you do it with a wide embrace.

3. Writing RULES!

A beautiful play, a visually beautiful play, a feast for the eyes, a sumptious sensory experience unless it's a William Forsythe ballet or Charles Bukowski stories done with puppets (which I didn't see but I heard on very good authority was muthf@!#g amazing) is nothing if the writing is shit. It's just becomes so much window dressing - momentary distractions and utterly forgettable.

4. Actors shouldn't be critics

Yikes, I have a lot of opinions which, like a true actor, I am very good at running at the mouth and talking about after I've seen a show...within, of course, the correct amount of politcally safe walking distance of said show. However, I will say, with great sincerity, this is an art-form I love, even if the culture couldn't give a shit and most of our audience are going the way of the Dodo bird, so I wish I had fallen in love with more of the 24 shows that I sat through (in true Bogart fashion - leaning forward, arms uncrossed)...

But, theater, like faith, can't be willed - you're either a believer or your not.

And so the Nostalgia sets in...(a few thoughts on being "abroad").

2007-09-03T08:56:00.000-07:00

Of course, when it was all over and even in the midst of being there and doing performance # 24, I kept on having the same thought, the same reoccurring thought, which went something like "jesus christ, we really pulled this off, we are in Scotland, we are back in Edinburgh, I can see the Castle from my window and I am doing my castmate's dishes, we're back, Baby, we're back." When we were selling Shoni's t.v. and my hardback copy of "Kafka on the Shore" and Kim's juicer/hotpants/Nina Simone record/DVD of Napoleon Dynamite during our ghetto-fabulous stoop sale on Bedford Avenue in the middle of June I wasn't so sure we were going to pull it off. But, oh boy, we did and we did it, if I do say so myself, with aplomb! Plus, the cliche is true: the harder you work, the sweeter the rewards or maybe you can chalk that up to being brought up with the whole American "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" ethos.

The Fringe Festival in Edinburgh a magical experience, a kind of delicious bubble (think College) where the only thing that matters for a whole month is doing the best show that you can do, drinking the best beer you can after you do said best show, then seeing the other "best shows" that other people are doing in the Festival, and drinking more of that best beer, and then having the best hook-ups (it's a town full of actors - perfect for superficial intimacy and built-in endings!!!) and getting up the next day and doing it all over again.

And, what makes it all so wonderful is that it's this finite month so you are constantly aware that time is running away from you - you are forced to Carpe Diem whether you want to or not.

Chicken Little

2007-07-16T10:54:00.000-07:00

I had the curious thought this weekend about the Iraq War… what if we were winning? Would George Bush be so despised? I have a theory that the reason Americans are turning away from him in such droves is not because he is an incompetent, piece-of shit, liar but because he is a loser. We hate losers and we hate losing; it goes against our mythology and it contradicts our status as the world’s last remaining hyper-power. Scary to think that if we were winning Karl Rove really would have crowned the Emperor and the Republicans would, indeed, be solidifying their plans for a fifty-year reign.

I had this thought because I think about the Iraq war everyday . The news out of Baghdad and beyond reinforces the disparity at play in the world still I move along with my life: I shop, I rehearse, I pursue my goals, I read US Weekly, I party, I even hope but there is a sense of unease about how world events are playing out around me. I am often accused of being a “Debbie Downer” because I can’t quite divorce myself from the fact that much of the world seems to be spinning into ever greater chaos and barbarism by the day.

Chalk it up to listening to too much NPR.

Needless to say, I spend a fair amount of time feeling guilty. Sure, I have had my share of hardships but none of them involve a roadside bomb or death in crowded marketplace because I needed to get some rice. I am not exactly sure how to turn my guilt, my frustration, my rage really, into meaningful action. I suspect that there are a fair amount of Americans who feel as I do and I hope (yes, this is where hope comes in) we collectively put down our credit cards and shopping bags, turn off the tv’s and do something about it one day. Till then I will try and temper my chicken-little speech and live my life as honorably as I can, silently honoring those suffering at home and away.

BRINGING SEXY BACK.

2007-07-13T08:15:00.000-07:00

I haven’t blogged in a year. At least.

Why?

I lost my taste for it and, more to the point, life took over – it took over in that nagging, kind-of “oh god, where did my day go?” and “when will I have time to do my laundry” kind of way. Oh yeah, and I really committed to being part of a theater company which is the equivalent of getting married and having a baby. Seriously. It’s a commitment only you’re married to, about, five other people and there’s no sex. More like plural marriage. Think “Big Love” without the Mormonism.

So for all of you reading this who I don’t see on a daily basis which is to say, no one, I am still trucking along (as R. Crumb would say). Still doing the office monkey thing and, yes, still acting despite the protestations of my mother. My sweet mother (I love her and that is said without irony or snarkiness) who is merely worried and can’t understand why I keep shrugging off permanent jobs that offer the promise of health care and a 401K, for the chance to runoff with the gypsies because they have offered me a spot in the circus.

And speaking of running off with gypsies… I am about to. In about two weeks I am off to the Edinburgh Fringe for a month. Shalimar (said, theater company/plural marriage, I mentioned) is off to Scotland to show our wares, our latest show, our, yes, screaming baby (I am never one to let go of a metaphor even a bad, cliché-ridden one). And…that is, in part, why, folks, I decided it was time to blog again –to document life for the next month in the thieves’ den.

I’ll get a 401K when I’m forty (sorry, Mom!).

2007-02-26T14:42:00.000-08:00

The Shalimar proudly (re)presents "stirring" March 16th, 17th, 18 and March 22nd, 23rd, 24th and 25th AT the InterArt Annex.

Shalimar is (re)throwing up one of our most popular pieces “stirring”! “stirring” is a modern-day Pygmalion tale inspired by real life personal ads, blogs and emails and tells a bittersweet and funny story of 7 New York hipsters navigating the line between fantasy, lust, love, hope and reality.

ON March 17th, 23rd and 24th: Please Join Us for a Night of Hipster Speed Dating after the Show !!

Even though it's snowing Spring is just around the corner and we're in the mood for love! Leave your laptop behind and come out and speed date. Watch our show, have a few Brooklyn Brewery Beers (on us!), and then get ready to get to know the rest of the audience. The next day you might NOT be going to brunch alone...

March 17th & 24th: Straight Speed dating.
March 23d: Gay Speed dating (cause this ain't the middle ages).

FOR $ 20 you get A SHOW, 2 DRINKS AND a Chance to meet the LOVE OF YOUR LIFE or at least meet some really cool activity partners.

What I did This Summer

2006-05-30T23:23:00.000-07:00

(The Theater at Round Lake which looks a lot like a set piece from "Our Town").

My Summer Begins Now!

I start working on a one-person show (scary! exciting! terrifiying!)this week... Did I mention scary?! Also doing a reading and helping my friends, Barbara and Bondo kick of the inaugural season of their theater, Round Arts in Round Lake, NY.

Mo' Info here: http://www.home.earthlink.net/~roundarts/id4.html

Some Thoughts on the Artist and Money (and what exactly one has to do with the other)

2006-05-30T22:14:00.000-07:00

It's been a dramatic year thus far for me: I fell in love (albeit briefly, if truly, madly, deeply). I was dissappointed by love (was it love or just the appearance of it and was I subsequently more in love with the rejection of love? If I went to a shrink - I don't because I think they encourage an obsession with the "self" and tend to just perpetuate one's own narcissicsm and god knows we have enough of that in the culture already - I might explore my love of the unlovable instead I just blog about it to total strangers). But I quickly fell out of love though it's effects have lingered on...

I also had my first glimpse into the mortality of my parents: my father had a brush with his heart and I, in turn, had to deal with the reality of time and the cycle of life (?) in a way that was not just an excersise in abstract thinking about "when" and "what if"... I am getting older, the life experiences are starting to add up: the joys of my life grow as does my gratitude of being alive but so does my horror of just how brutal life is (I've been reading the articles on the Hadatha massacre which give new meaning to the not-so -banality of evil and makes one shudder for the deep wellspring of outright cruelty and savagery human beings are all too capable of that, in extension, I am capable of...right?).

In the past year, I have worked harder and longer and more consistently than I have, probably, since my first year out of college - 2 jobs, 7 days a week type of thing. And, despite a grinding schedule (a grinding schedule of my own choosing so I am not complaining) I have continued to try to nurture my artistic life, like so many of my friends - my peers who have, like me, foregone the lure of the (now dissappearing) middle class American life and decided to pursue an artist's life in the biggest of big cities. We hope that one day we will be able to fondly look back at our days slinging hash just to be able to rehearse in parking garages, begging and stealing and borrowing to make our theater, write our novel, paint, bang on the can, what have you. But, my question is what if we can't? Does creativity stop when it becomes apparent at some point that the money isn't going to come in? And, when did we start believing that artistic legitimacy was qualified by the amount we got paid for it?

In the midst of these life changes (?) or are they life realizations (?) I am more committed now than ever to being an artist, an artist-citizen. Despite my new-found commitment I refuse to buy (and buy is the right word to use for this) into the notion that my artistic life is quantifiable by how much I get paid for it. Would I like to make money eventually and work solely as an artist? Hell yes and I hold out the hope that I will! But I don't think Bruce Willis is a more legitimate artist or Matthew Barney for that matter because their coffers are loaded with greater stock options than mine. The full-time artist is a relatively new phenemeneon in history, and, yes, I am fully aware that the Medeci's sponsored more than their fair share of the greats and that Leonardo didn't do much else but paint but history ( museums and Shakespeare's folios) is litterred with the works of people who toiled and gleaned by day only to create in their spare moments (and remember leisure time is a relatively new development).

Finally, I think you create because you have to, because it's a relief and it's mysterious and, yes, I have to say it, it's transcendent and you do it because it gives you some measure of control over what you see in the world. You'd do it, I do it, for free, I do it because I love it, I do it for reasons that can never be broken down into check-form.

All that being said: I look forward to giving up the day job.

Tom Cruise as a Metaphor for America

2006-05-16T22:09:00.000-07:00

Tom Cruise has fallen off his perch, the Midas of Motion Pictures, the ace in a fly-boy suit, the original "Top Gun", the Hollywood Jet-Fighter: on-screen and off who always seemed to be able to hit his target especially if it was the box-office has come careening off his celluloid throne. Undone by none other than Tom Cruise, apparently. It would seem that Tom Cruise bought the line that unless your life is being recorded it's not worth living (hence the endless forays to Oprah's white couch, shot after shot of Tom in a crowd, Tom in Germany, Tom in Manhattan, Tom, Tom, Tom at Tom's premiere and yet another one of Tom at Tom's premiere with his zombiefied Katie doll supernaturally glued to his side, legs akimbo, eyes wide and blankly open, the ultimate Stepford wife).

What set off the anti-Tom rebellion? His bizarre promotional blitz of his love affair with a teenage acting Katie Holmes revealed a certain kind of creepiness that everyone suspected was there - the blind allegence to all things Scientology, no sensible person would honestly follow the dicates of L.Ron Hubbard, and the whispers of Tom's homosexuality which are too frequently debated to not believe, on some level, must be true. Once the cracks became visible on Tom's carefully contructed shinier-than-thou persona - there was no going back. Even the audience as it watched yet another preview for Mission Impossible Three, as Tom speedboats, gets blown up, recovers only to get blown up again, and Philip Seymour Hoffman's beady eyes glistened with hambone delight at being a good actor playing the ultimate bad guy, to shots of Tom as he heartily kissed his love interest, a brunette that didn't look entirely dissimiliar from Ms. Holmes, despite the onslaught of images edited around one overriding concept (to make Tom's character, Ethan Hunt, but really just Tom look like the ultimate multi-national hero) you could still sense that the movie-going public didn't buy it - instead the prevailing sentiment of viewers seemed to be "I think that guy's kind of a wierdo now."

Tom seemed all powerful not to long ago like America itself; it seemed as if the man and the nation could do no wrong, bouncing back from every conceivable set-back with a bigger movie (last summer it was a Spielberg flick for which he got paid $100 million dollars) and a better photo-op. The problem is the audience can no longer be convinced to just sit back, in the dark, and escape into his invincible grin, the kilo-watt smile has taken on a faustian quality and it is almost possible to believe Tom signed on the dotted line long ago.

Eventually, the devil comes to claim his debt and to think otherwise is just... a mission impossible.

An Urbanite's Lament or an Extremely Pretentious Wish List.

2006-05-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

1. I wish I had time to read the great books.

2. I wish I had time to read Moby Dick.

3. I wish I had time to read Ulysses.

4. I wish I had time to take a class that explained Ulysses to me.

5. I wish I had the time and money to take a spanish, french, italian and portugeuse class.

6. I wish I had the money and time to travel to spain, france, italy and brazil.

7. I wish I could go to the Frick everyday.

8. I wish New York wasn't turning into an urban mall.

9. I wish money didn't rule and wasn't a deciding factor on how one lives one's life.

10.I wish religion would dissappear.

11.I wish religious fundamentalist would dissappear with it.

12.I wish women were allowed to grow old without feeling the need to turn their faces into frozen t.v. dinners.

13.I wish I didn't feel the need to impress.

14.I wish there was no stock market.

15.I wish we weren't turning the planet into a giant fishkills landfill.

16.I wish "the fairness" doctrine were still in place.

17.I wish the Heritage Institute would crumble.

18.I wish talent were the deciding factor.

19.I wish celebrities would stop using the African continient as a photo-op.

20. I wish I had more time to blog.

The Beat My Heart Skipped.

2006-03-18T18:05:00.001-08:00

Last week I worked a catering job. My first. It took place at Halston's (the famous coke-snorting, Studio 54 dwelling designer from the 1970's) old house. His former home is a black Chrome box which looks an awful lot like a fortress on East 63rd Street and it is sandwiched improbably between stately looking brownstones. The inside of Halston's old digs are a throwback to 70's hedonism all straight lines and plush surfaces that speak to nights without end and walking through it with it's pictures of Liza splayed out on the floor and Andy holding court in the living room one couldn't help but think "if only these walls could talk". The house had been rented out for a corporate event, the new owners apparently want to make a little money off of living in this historic (?) home. The thinking in this must be since it was once a destination point for Manhattan's glitteratti why shouldn't it be again?

This particular party was to, no joke, promote luxury leathers made out of horse and the entire catering staff was dressed up in equasterian garb - jodhupers, straight-legged black boots, crisp white shirts. We were told to be "loose", "to flirt," to, in the words of the German ex-patriot and former supermodel hostess purring instructions, "to have fun, ganou?" and to "work our zuper sex appeal". The crowd I was serving cosmos to (or rather "pink martinis" as I was instructed to say because cosmos, as everyone who is anyone who reads any publication put out by Conde Nast knows, are hopelessly "over") was much more staid than the crowd of folks who wiled away the hours in Halston's house in the 70's. The only white powder I saw was the salt in the kitchen being sprinkled over the seared asparagus that was being cut up and served as an hors d'oeurve.

Still the money for grinning in too tight horse-riding pants whilst making sure that everyone got a slice of lemon in their Pelligrino was good, nay, it was great. Two hundred dollars for pouring and stirring while serving conquetishly ain't bad and I left the evening with my friend, Nate feeling flush. Almost immeaditely I started an internal debate on if I should spend this money on a long desired i-pod or if I should tuck it into the bank for my most recent travel dream of going to Peru sometime in the next year on a South American jaunt or if I should use it to pay for a check-up which, being uninsured, I haven't had in a long time. Momentarily interrupting my money fantasy to check my cellphone (because it had been several hours and who know who could have called!) I got a rather vague but anxious sounding phone call from my mother telling me to call her. I knew something odd was happenning because there are only certain days in which she calls usually the end of the week and the beginning of the week, rarely the middle of the week. It was late but the call made me nervous and I knew my anxiety over why she was breaking with habit and calling me on a Wednesday rather than our usual Monday or Friday would bother me all night so I decided to call right away. She picked up after the first couple of rings. My father was in the hospital.

Immeaditely upon hearing the words "chest pain" and "hospital" and "heart surgery" my own heart starts to beat with the fury of, yes, ten thousand horses (it was, afterall, an equesterian themed evening) and I try not to panic or immeaditely succumb to my own theatrically-trained (over)dramatic nature. Instead I ask a flurry of questions in what I think is a very calm and measured voice which my mother tries to answer back in her own calm, measured, voice. My father is an older man and though I am not overly morbid I am also not deluded and the older I have gotten I have had thoughts (that, admittedly, come with increasing frequency) that there might be a day when... well, you know what the end of that thought is, right? That there might be a day when he will not be with me and I will have to face the realities of life's terrors (Hamlet called 'em "slings and arrows") without him. And, yes, that terrifies me but I also tend not to dwell and, generally, don't like to project into the future (mine or anyone else's the exception being George W. Bush who I often imagine leaving office to protests and rioting). Too much crytal-ball gazing about one's own life in my experience either results in a pity party (starring yourself) or a romantic comedy (starring yourself). As my brother wisely told me, "try and live in the present as much as possible because there is only one absolute certaintity about the future: death."

My father had the presence of mind to realize that something odd was happening to his heart and that it wasn't just idigestion from an especially flavorful meal the night before. My mother, ever the optomist, thought it was just a case of heartburn but my father realized something was awry and went to the hospital. He was right and though he did not have a heart attack he was definitely headed in that direction so, two days later the surgeon cut open his chest and worked on replacing the valves in his heart - he had a quadruple bypass surgery. I, because of work and travel, did not make it home and the day he had the surgery was one of the most nervous and humbling of my life so far. Bypass surgery is increasingly common, in fact, when I told my friends of my familial news almost everyone had an anecdote about some aunt or grandfather that had had multiple bypasses and was "still kickin." Whether or not Auntie or Grandpa did actually get quadruple bypass surgery or my friends were just telling me so to put my mind at ease I do not know. Nonetheless, I was comforted by the thought that every family has to deal with major heart surgery. The hours my father lay in the operating room, I tried to distract myself from thinking, about really contemplating, that there was a remote chance that I might not see him ever...again.

I don't really think about death too often perhaps because up until this point I have not had to face too much of it in my own life. Of course I have known people who have died but they have either been aquintances or distant relatives. It's odd to realize that other than the occassional philosophical pondering of "the great mystery of the universe" i.e. "what the fuck am I doing here?" or reading about deaths so great you cannot help be struck by the utter senselessness of tragedy, I don't think about death that often. Does anyone other than tenured philosophy professors and priests? It's odd to realize that you have gone through your life thus far relatively untouched by life's only certaintity. Is this just unique to me? Or is it common in a culture that obscures and ignores and, frankly, reviles mortality and it's bedfellow - aging? I once read about a student who studied under Margaret Mead and said that before his first anthropoligical expedition she asked him if he had ever witnessed a child being born or if he had ever seen another person die? He said no and she said of course not because in western culture both events are hidden from us, and, condsidered, ironically, wholly unnatural.

My father is recovering. I am greatly relieved at this news and his progress is steady. My mother tells me he is very weak, sleeping a great deal, has no apetite except, oddly enough, for milk. Apparently, he asked her for some ice-cream. It is difficult for me to hear these details and bluntly put, it scares me to think of my father being infantilized. Especially when I still feel like such a child myself. I think about this when I take the "L" train to Never-never land, my tragically hip neighborhood in Brooklyn, and watch all the lost boys and girls sulk and pose. Each one more beatiful than the next, their oufits, their i-pods, their haircuts, a testament to their purchase power and agonizingly cool tastes. I study them and think of my father who never wanted to be anything but an adult and I wonder how they will grow old? How will they deal with the betrayal of their bodies? How will I?

How will we react when we can no longer count on our vanity to distract us?

Never Forget: or the United States of Amnesia

2006-03-14T19:49:00.000-08:00

A Chronology of Scandal from 2000 to 2006, the Bush Years (thus far).

November 2000 - Florida cannot be called for either Bush or Gore because of hanging chads, Ralph Nader and Jeb Bush's campaign to intimidate black voters and purge the voter rolls of "felons."

November 2000- Neither side will concede and the Democrats press for a recount, both sides begin to assemble their legal teams.
Tom Delay's entire congressional staff flies down to Florida to storm the the Voter offices in Miami-Dade (hmm, did, contributions from the Chocatow Indian Tribe by way of Jack Abramoff bankroll the trip?).
Republicans protest that there was nothing wrong with the voting machines despite evidence to the contrary. Pat Buchannan remains the favorite candidate of the ederly, mostly retired, Jewish population of Palm Beach.
Jeb takes angry phone calls from his younger brother saying "I thought you said you'd deliver Florida?"

December 2000 - Katherine Harris, Florida Secretary of State, stops the hand recounts.
The Florida Supreme Court rules in favor of the recount.
The Bush legal Team goes to the Federal Supreme Court demands they stop the recount. Sandra Day O'Connor, eager to retire, and Antonin Scalia eager for Opus Dei to take control of the Constitution, plus Renquist, Thomas, et al, vote Bush into office.
Despite their federalist viewpoint that State law trumps federal law, politics, evidently, trumps judicial philosophy.
Joe Lieberman concedes. Al Gore bitterly follows. George W. Bush...wins?

January 2001 - George W. Bush takes office on a rainy day (God crying?) and cannot even climb outside the presidential Lincoln Town Car because angry protestors might throw an egg at him.

January 2001 - Bush appoints cabinet members: Corporate fat-cats and incompetent idealogues. He promises to be the "CEO President."
Enron's stock falls to $42 a share because of circulating rumors of financial mismanagement.

August 2001 - Bush gets a memo that reads "Bin Laden determined to stike in U.S."
He is on vacation in Crawford, TX just six months after he takes office.
He has brush to clear and a photo-op with a chain-saw.
Assumes Condi will show it to Veep and Big Dick Bacon-Heart will take care of it.

September 11, 2001 - Bin Laden's determination(as described in memo) has paid off.
Towers are hit, and crumble into a burning, ash-ridden pyre. 3000 people lose their lives: Americans and immigrants.

September, 2001 - Bush and Cheney both go into hiding in undisclosed locations (an underground bunker in Nebraska is the rumor).
Just like Churchill did during the London Blitz and FDR during Pearl Harbor!?!
7 hours after the attack they eventually get flown back to D.C. Bush runs into Richard Clarke and tells him, in not so many words, to figure out how to implicate Iraq.

From Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies:

"Look," he told us. "I know you have a lot to do and all … but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way."
I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed.
"But, Mr. President, Al Qaeda did this."
"I know, I know, but … see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred."
"Absolutely, we will look … again." I was trying to be more respectful, more responsive. "But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of Al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen."
"Look into Iraq, Saddam," the President said testily and left us.

September, 2001 - Five days later after all flights have been grounded with the exception of Bin Laden's family's private jet which was allowed to leave the country, Bush appears in New York surronded by SWAT teams.
He tells Americans not to be scared and not to let the terrorists win - they can do this by continuing to shop. Using a credit card is fearless.

October, 2001 - Bush orders troops to bomb Afghanistan.
One conservative commentator says that we should "bomb them back to the stone ages".
Many people remark that Afghanistan hasn't entirely come out of the stone ages and Ann Coulter wisely advises that we kill all their leaders and convert the entire population to Christianity.
Conservatives declare Noam Chomsky a traitor and moral relativism dead.
Andrew Sullivan, glad for once that the radical Christian right isn't focusing all its energies on the evils of the "homosexual agenda", writes an article for the NYTIMES Magazine declaring a new war of civilizations.
Rapturists rejoice and Tim LaHaye's "Left Behind Series" sees an even greater spike in sales. Secular Americans with a modicum of critical thinking skills are scared shitless as they begin to realize the country is quite possibly being run by end-timers.
Toby Keith records a song that promises "towel-heads" they will get an American boot shoved up their ass.
The Emmy's continue as scheduled but most stars wear black and the red carpet is scrapped for security reasons.

November, 2001 - Whispers of an Invasion of Iraq start to make it's way around the Media-Industrial Complex.
Suddenly there is an "Office of Special Plans" that is populated by brash, chicken-hawk militarists, calling themselves "Neo-Cons."
Old policy papers from the American Enterprise Institute advocating regime change in the Middle East are dusted off and carefully scrutinized.
Americans continue to work and shop. Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt are still married.
Bush's popularity is in the high 70's or 80's and pundits talk about American Unity and the end of 90's decadence.

December, 2001 - The Iraq War, the invasion of Iraq, WMD's, Judith Miller are about to come very familiar words in the next year.

(To Be Continued - Next up: 2002).

Music Is My Bag.

2006-02-20T19:01:00.000-08:00

I have been on some kind of crazy music buying binge lately. I am not sure entirely what has brought this on. I suspect it's the fact that I still don't have an i-pod and I suffer from i-pod envy and I act as if I do have an i-pod which, we've established, I don't. Goddamn it, I too want to have 5000 songs at the mere touch of a finger (or more accurately the swipe of a thumb).
My bag acts as a giant cd case with discs haphazardly stored between my wallet and gym sneakers. Though, my finances don't entirely merit the cd purchases I justify it with the fact that Virgin is having a killer sale and why shouldn't I take advantage of all the music that is selling for a mere $9.99?!? Plus, from all that I've been reading about the music industry - they could use some help and I am nothing, if not, philanthropic. Sadly, while I could use a little charity myself it's easy to justify spending a few dollars here and there on precious lullabies perfectly suited for subway journeys and crosstown bus rides.

I bought the latest Death Cab for Cutie cd because I am a sucker for Ben Gibbard's sweet melodies. This is music tailored for a generation weaned on John Hughes movies. Every song is prettier than the next with clever lyrics that can't help but make you feel like you are not entirely unlike Molly Ringwald in "Sixteen Candles" -- listening to them you think that, sigh, someday the most popular guy in school will take notice of you and bake or buy you a huge cake for your birthday at the end of the movie, in this case - your life - you'll kiss while a pretty Thompson Twins song starts to play and the credits roll.

Ben Gibbard is the Shel Silverstein of the indie-music world and the first song on the album starts off with him singing that "if I can open my arms and span the island of Manhattan I'd bring it to where you are, making a lake of the east river and Hudson" before the choral refrain that goes "Water seeps into your heart through a pin hole, just like a faucet that leaks and there is comfort in the sound, and while you debate half-empty or half-full, it slowly rises, your love is going to drown." The catchy and irresistable synth pop melody rises and falls (like money - R.I.P F. Scott Fitz.) underneath the prettiest voice in today's alt-pop scene sings.

Listening to these tunes which mainly deal with love affairs gone awry makes the Monday morning commute/ darwinian subway pole dance seem almost...glamorous (or at the very least, whimsical) and that, my friends, makes the $14.99 I contributed to Sony's coffers and Ben Gibbard's bank account more than worth it.

Immeadiate Family

2006-02-09T19:13:00.000-08:00

I can remember the first time I picked up Sally Mann’s book of photographs entitled "Immediate Family." I was in college, and, I remember being utterly fascinated by the photographs which chronicle her children’s lives from childhood to puberty. The images capture her three children in various stages of play: eating Popsicle sticks, dressing up dolls, getting a bloody nose, running around the yard of their West Virginia home, and, in them one can see the fearlessness of youth. These could be any other snapshots of an American childhood if it weren’t for the stark beauty of the shots which practically gleam on the page. Mann shoots her children in stark black and whites and the pictures have a Victorian Gothic quality. This is a slightly eerie world where the darkness of adulthood lurks in the background reminding us that childhood can be spoiled at any moment. Mann’s children are too real to be ghosts - they bleed, they cry, they laugh – but the photographs of their youth still haunt nevertheless.

The Shell

2006-02-01T07:36:00.000-08:00

I caught the tail end of Bush's (mis)State of the Union address last night. I must confess, I actively avoid watching or hearing our (?) President because when I see him trample all over the English language (not to mention the constitution) I am filled with such anger and despair it makes me feel slightly crazed. Watching him spout his empty phrases, I feel like a radically confused character in a Kafka novel. The Bush years have made me feel like Gregor in the Metamorphosis, my mind spinning, as I try to figure out how it all went so wrong, wishing I could wake up from this nightmare to find the country restored back to its former self. Then again, I am nothing if not (overly) dramatic.
Watching George, his mouth twitching, his face grimacing, I realized I hadn't seen him in a while (as previously stated I avoid him as if he were a living Medusa and his blinking stare could penetrate the t.v. screen and permanently turn me to stone) and I couldn't help but think: George doesn't look too good unlike Clinton, who seemed to get more sated (insert blowjob joke here) with each passing year he spent in the Oval Office. When Bill took to the Senate floor to deliver his State of the Union, he looked like there was no place he'd rather be, waxing poetic about the majesty of our wheat filled nation with it's little pink houses for you and me; his love of Government and his belief in it's benevolence was evident (as was his egoism). George, by contrast, looks positively drained, even his signature issues, roughly put: God, Guns, Guts, Glory, sounded hollow. He looked bored when talking about the "lives of the unborn" and "faith based initiatives" even the defense of "spreading freedom" and giving the "gift of liberty" came off as half-hearted. The "political capitol" he famously said he had earned when he won (?) the election in 2004 is drying up and, last night, he had the look of a man who can't be bothered to take up another collection basket.
As I sat and watched last night's dog and pony show it all seemed depressingly predictable: the Republicans jump up and down, on cue, whenever Bush has his applause line and the Democrats sit and look...defeated. I realize that I am the most politically engaged on a superficial level that I have ever been in my life. Even though, I have admitted that I avoid looking at Bush or turn off the radio when I hear his phony twang, I keep constant tabs on the evildoings of his administration. I know about the NSA wiretapping scandal, I know about the squandering of funds in Iraq, I am keenly aware that when Alito got confirmed there was a shift of power to the right on the Supreme Court, I read, I listen, I watch, and, I generally feel one moment of rage almost every day. Still knowing all of this information, I am, at once, thoroughly aware but curiously detached. I care, I care deeply and I am pissed off and I am scared and right now I feel totally numb. I am as uninspired and helpless as the party that is supposed to represent me: the Democrats. I know I should resist, and I want to, but I don't even know how to start fighting.

Sweet Little Lies...

2006-01-30T07:49:00.000-08:00

Since I haven't read the book "A Million Little Pieces", am never home early or up late enough to watch "Oprah" (and, don't have a working televison or cable) I am hesitant to weigh in on the scandale-Frey. But, I am going to anyway, if only because I think this particular bru-ha-ha about lies/publishing/self-promotion/money/ money/mo' money is interesting and all too symptomatic of our day. James Frey, as all of us over-saturated media consumers know, is the now disgraced author of the book "A Million Little Pieces". The book was, a supposedly, heartwrenching and raw account of his trip down the rabbit hole of addiciton and his subsequent climb back to a respectable life in Middle Earth. Turns out, it might have been better to file Mr. Frey's memoir under fiction rather than autobiography.

I wouldn't be the first to point out that there is something frighteningly appropriate about the fact that la scandale-Frey is playing itself out during the Bush Years. The 2004 Election were a textbook example fo the way truth has become completely abstract: it belongs to whoever is best at manipualting or spinning reality. James Frey grossly lied about his journey to hell and the question has to be asked: for what purpose? To make his battle with drug addiction as titillating, fanatastic, and profitable as possible. Frey suffers from the same addiction that many Americans battle: the insatiable desire for money and notoriety no matter what the cost. In this age of "there's no such thing as bad publicity", James Frey's notoriety is a triumph: everyone's talking about him, he's been on Oprah not once but twice, and his book, despite his recent fall from grace, will still sell because, now, the public is morbidly curious and will want to see what the fuss is all about.

It is hard not to blame the Publishing Company, Doubleday, who got calls from the Rehab Center featured in Frey's book questioning his description of his treatment while there. By then, of course, Oprah, from the heights of her studio on Mount Olympus, er, Chicago, had stamped the book with her midas "O" logo, catapulting it into the best seller ranks, and making
"A Million Little Pieces" the reading material of choice for thousands of soccer Moms. Had the website The Smoking Gun not looked for his mugshot and uncovered the fact that James Frey's real addiction seems to be lying, he'd still be a hero. Everyone, especially Americans, loves a comeback kid and is there anything more heartening than a reformed (white) crack-addict turned best-selling author? The question though is anyone really surprised? Oprah, to her credit, brought James Frey back to her floating sofa and she looked like Zeus, as she threw thunder bolts across the pillows at him.

James Frey is just another hackneyed opportunist but his story illuminates what happens when institutions are more interested in profit and, as a result, don't ask questions that can distinguish truth from fiction.

Birthday

2006-01-26T11:08:00.000-08:00

And so it's your birthday. And here you are, another year older, and you are getting to an age where people start having certain expectations of you, of what your life should look like. Up to this age, you may have resisted those expectations and shrugged off a "normal" life with a 401 K plan and stock options but, you can't help but wonder if you should explain why you, say, aren't married, don't own property or have health insurance and, furthermore, why it doesn't look like you will anytime soon.

And so it's your birthday and you have to admit with each passing year it's becoming just that little bit harder to jump around from job-to-job and to live in an apartment with two roommates pursuing "your art". Loath as you are to admit it, there's a part of you that deeply craves the white picket fence (a post-modern white picket fence, of course) and a cul-de-sac. If your being honest, there's part of you that would trade it in for the idea that you might feel secure and stable especially after you pick up a paper and it seems like everything you read speaks to a world on a tightrope, net-free, with chaos looming down below. You realize on this, your birthday, that one day your parents won't be around to, actually, write you a check and take you out to dinner to celebrate, one day, you'll have to figure it all out on your own. You can't help but compare yourself to your mother at this age and realize she was raising her third child and had already been married for ten years. You've dated three different guys this year alone and, if your being honest, two of them were just flings.

And so it's your birthday and you try to enjoy the dinner your parents are treating you to and try not to think too hard about whether or not you should be apologizing for not having accomplished as much as you wanted to at your age. And so it's your birthday and you realize your life is what it is and just maybe you don't have anything to apologize for. You blow out the candle, eat the buttercream cake you bought yourself, stop feeling so ashamed (what's the point?) and get ready to start another year.

A Few of My Favorite Thing(s).

2006-01-13T10:12:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite places in New York City has to be the Frick. The Frick Museum (Collection?) is housed in a gorgeous, baroque, limestone building that almost looks like it was stolen from the Left Bank and moved to the Upper East Side (which wouldn't be much of a stretch, would it?) The building and collection were both, originally, owned by John Frick who was your quintessential captain of industry/ gilded age scion/ rat-bastard with a lot of money and a very fine taste for art. He collected a lot of renaissance pieces and there is an entire room dedicated to religious art (pietas and the like). If you are a leftwinger: ignore the fact that John Frick was, apparently, an incredibly ruthless businessman who brutally exploited his workers and just revel in the glory of his limestone mansion.

Stepping into the Frick you can understand why the Victorians were so obsessed with money: if you had enough of it you could live in a gorgeous house that you could stuff with John Singer Sargent paintings. The inside of the Frick museum is beautiful and completely peaceful; there, usually, aren't huge, frazzled crowds galloping from one section to the next like there are at the Met. Simply put: this is not a Louvre-sized collection so you feel like you can take your time wandering around, free of the worry that if you don't hurry you'll miss the Egyptian tombs, and the early medevil goblets. Plus, the setting in which the art hangs is a former home and there is an intimacy about the entire collection; it feels lived in somehow. Walking around it's hallowed halls you understand why art collecting was and is an obsession for those with a disposable income. Collect the right pieces, a la Frick, and your history will become inextricably linked to artistic greatness.

The lushness of the home and the collection will leave you slightly breathless and if it weren't for the yellow cabs zipping by the French windows you might even think that you were in Vienna.

Don't Call it a Comeback.

2006-01-09T13:23:00.000-08:00

MATCH POINT (Don't read if you want to be surprised)

What can I say? I, too, am a victim to hype, so I went to see "Match Point" this weekend despite the fact that I have pretty much hated most Woody Allen offerrings as of late. Not to mention that, on a personal level, I find the man creepy --someone who runs off with his girlfriend's adopted daughter is, quite rightly, bound to raise some eyebrows and furrow a few brows (mine are no exeception). Nonetheless, the lure of Scarlett Johansen and Johnathen Rys Meyer's pillowly beauty proved too strong to resist. As I watched our stars frolick on screen through the streets of London (and on top of each other) I couldn't help but wonder: what would it be like to have lips that resemble a goose-down duvet cover? But enough about the smackers: how now, the film? First off, I've never seen "Crimes and Misdemeanors", and my friends who are more serious film-goers (Cahiers du Cinema types) wondered aloud why Woody had decieded to remake "Crimes" but just set it in England this time around? Apparently, it traffics in the same theme, namely: is luck a more potent force than justice? Or the philosophical shorthand might be: is God dead?

The film centers around a young man, Chris Wilton, who, retired from the pro-tennis circuit, takes up employment at a very swishy tennis club where he teaches the uber-rich of London how to swing a racket. Chris, apparently, is born under an extremely lucky sign ( the luck metaphor is, ridiculously, hammered home but, admittedly, pays off at the end of the film) and he is assigned to teach a super richie named, Tom. Tom takes a liking to Chris when he finds out that they both share a love of opera (another straight man who loves Puccinni is a rare find!). Tom, naturally, invites Chris to join his family at the opera in their box at the London equivalent of the Met and so Chris meets Chloe, Tom's sister. Chloe takes a shine to the modest but mod young tennis instructor Chris, a humble young man with great bone structure and the aforementioned pillowy lips, and she offers to show him around the Saatchi Gallery and...you know what happens next, right? It is a short step from gallery hopping to bed hopping and Tom teaches Chloe, uh, a thing or two about swinging a racket. Chris gets absorbed into the super-richie family when he marries Chloe, and Chloe's father gives Chris a job and welcomes him into the family fold and if it ended right there then this would be a nice cross-gendered remake of a Jane Austen novel but, alas, the shots of Chris reading "Crime and Punishment" foreshadow the darkness that looms ahead.

The darkness takes form in a rather light and sexy package when Tom's American girlfriend shows up: Nola Rice, one Scarlett Johansen, Marilyn Monroe for the hipster set, who really gets Chris' tennis balls bouncing. Despite the fact that he's married to just about the nicest heiress in London (played by Emily Mortimer who, lacks the poutage of Ms. Johansen but makes up for it with gazelle-like beauty) he can't help but want his own shot at this American sexpot. He gets his shot and the two embark on a charged and erotic affair, one that is part pure sexual friction and, the other mutual desperation. Chris and Nola, you see, are kinderd spirits: two interlopers in a world of wealth whose beauty, charm and luck, is a passport to a world of privilige. When Nola's luck abruptly changes, however, she looks to Chris to be her salvation - she loves him and, furthermore, she needs him. Chris, however, is not so sure he wants to give up the lifestyle he and 1% of London have become accustomed to but Nola is a tenacious broad and is not about to let her man get off so easily. In other words: Nola has become a pest and Chris decides it's time to get Dostoyvesky on her ass.

So he, coldly, plots to kill her and to make it look like an accidental murder offs an old woman in her building too (sorry, Lady - wrong place at the wrong time - eh, luck again?!?). The last half-an-hour of the film is taut and suspensful (the most effective part of the storytelling) as the audience tenses up waiting for Chris to get caught or to not get caught. It's an odd position to be in as an audience member because, eventhough Chris is, clearly, a sociopath he is also the hero of the film, and, if you overlook the fact that he's been cheating on his wife, not entirely a bad guy. Also, I have had some interactions, myself, with someone I consider vaguley sociopathic and I think most pyschologists would agree that what is most frightening about them is how sympathetic, sincere, and seemingly honest they are. But, I think, Woody, is borrowing from Henry James in this story - James, of course, was a great chronicler of wealth and it's discontents; most of his stories end with "you can have love or money but you can't have both and you are going to be bitterly unhappy without one or the other." In short: money wins.

I wondered too, after I saw the film, if this was Woody Allen's answer or reaction to the 2004 election? I realize that might be far-fetched but, to me, that was the first time I lived through an event in which I felt the complete and profound absence of justice (and, am still feeling it). Of course, this film was shot in the summer of '04 so the answer, in all likelihood, is "no." Still, there is a case to be made for certain paralells: a young man, naturally charming, who, with great luck climbs up the ladder of wealth and privilige and the people around him who blindly accept him into their world, not realizing that they've actually aided and abetted a monster. Of course, they are too blind and invested in their own wealth and image to realize they've actually had a hand in their own ruining.

And I Said Nothing.

2006-01-09T12:26:00.000-08:00

One of my weekend rituals is buying the epic tome, The Sunday New York Times, and reading all the news that's fit to be legally vetted, leaked and printed. I, mainly, buy the Sunday paper to read Frank Rich (no Times Select Subscriber am I), the Arts Section, the front page (of course), the book review (which, depending on whose being reviewed and who is doing the reviewing I do or don't read), the "Style" section (or as I heard it once described "the Women's Sports Pages) and, last but not least, the NYTIMES Magazine. I hardly ever read the Metro Section unless, and this is disgusting to admit, there's an especially harrowing headline about...some terrible murder that has taken place, usually, in the outer buroughs. I never read about technology or real estate because I am not wealthy enough to afford either and my eyes rarely scan the Sports section but that will change this summer when, at long last, there's another World Cup.

Above all, I read the Magazine and this week there was an excellent article about the upcoming Supreme Court case, Hamden Vs. Rumsfeld. In a nutshell: Salim Hamden was Osama Bin Laden's driver/bodyguard and he was rounded up after 9/11 and taken to that netherworld of Guatanemo Bay where he has been kept ever since (without being tried - 4 years and counting). Now, the degree of just how involved he was in the plotting of terrorist acts is still debatable at this point - his lawyer's defense is that he was just another impressionable, poor, Yemen man who got involved in jihad but was not intimately aware of the plans to destroy the U.S.S Cole or the Twin Towers.

Obviously, Salim Hamden, by virtue of his proximity to Bin Laden, is guilty but this story is really how the Bush administration has chosen to prosecute the "war on terror." As it stands now, the President has the right to declare who is or isn't an "enemy combatant" and under the Geneva Convention you can hold an "enemy combatant" (fancy word for "prisoner of war") as long as the war wages on but, there's the rub, when you are fighting a war against a stateless enemy, in a "war on terror" (which, potentially, has no end, and no conclusive victory) those rules become murky. Now, the Bush admin. would like Salim Hamden to be prosecuted in secret by a military tribunal, his case would be heard by three, supposedly, impartial judges appointed by, get this, Donald Rumsfeld.

If you read this article (and you should) there are lots of chilling descriptions of Guatanemo - where inmates exists in perpetual limbo not knowing if they will ever get a chance to even be tried and, as the joke goes, "if they weren't terrorists when they went in, will be terrorists when they get out." The most disturbing aspect, of course, in reading about how our government is fighting this so-called war is the undue damage they are doing to our laws and our much vaunted system of checks and balances.

This is terribly scary stuff but it will be nearly impossible to make Americans realize that if Salim Hamden can be held indefinitely, charged with nothing, only to eventually be tried by a military tribunal then it is only a matter of time before they face the same fate (rightwing claptrap aside: that day is in the future- such is the slippery slope of an autocratic style of governance).

We are slouching towards despotism but most Americans are too preoccupied with Lindsay Lohan's bullemia to notice.

Resolved

2006-01-03T11:09:00.000-08:00

Ahhhh yes, t'is the time o' year to make resolutions. Cynics might grouse that New Year's resolutions are silly but I wholeheartedly endorse the notion that if you set your mind to it -- your whole life and all of your nasty habits can change overnight. This is America, goddamn it, where a trustfund, a famous last name, some prozac, and a personal trainer can make any goal a reality. To that end, this year I plan to:

1. Eat more cholcolate.

You only live once people and there's no reason to deny oneself one of life's greatest favors. Chocolate makes me believe in justice and everytime I eat a lindt truffle ball I think that there just might be an afterlife -- who else besides God could have created such a heavenly treat? Leave the fasting and macriobiotic morality eating to Gwyneth Paltrow, those of us working dead end jobs without windows need a reason to hope: so bring on the Toblerone!!

2. Read US Weekly.

Harpers is for sickly intellectual types who doubt the inherent goodness of our Commander in chief. I really don't want to hear anymore whinging about the national debt and the folly of Iraq so, this year, I prefer to nestle in the soft bosom of the celebu-freakdom news circuit. It's shaping up to be a good year, what with Angelina, high priestess of Unicef, possibly giving birth to a baby Brad and, of course, the fantastically sad end of Jessica and Nick: will they get back together? Will they stay apart? Will they date new people? Will they ever love again? Who gave up on the marriage first? Did anyone cheat?

A nation demands to know the truth! I, for one, cannot wait to see how this important news story plays itself out and I am prepared to be shocked and awed in '06 by the delightful antics of our extended celebrity family. No one does a better job catching the glorious daily lives of Paris and Nicole like the Staff at US Weekly (thank God it's US weekly and not US Bi-weekly-phew!) and I plan on turning the pages all year -- long live journalism!

3. Be Less Patient, Be less compassionate.

Time is money and this year I plan on being a bull! However, you won't need to wave a red flag in my face however because I plan to charge all year long. I think of Bill O'Reilly and I don't see an obnoxious blow-hard, I don't see a Joe McCarthy for the media age. I see a hardworking Long Island boy who gets to sexually harass his employees, bloviate about the state of moral decay and get paid a cool 63 mil to do it! Think he turns the other cheek? Think he sees the misfortune of others and, pauses, to reflect "there by the Grace of God go I?" Think he excersies patience and practices compassion? Hell no! It's hightime I start acting like an asshole because, evidently, they rule.

4. Use my credit card.

Who needs cash when you can pay for it with plastic? Look if the Fedi Gub'ment can run up a massive debt than why can't I? The saying that "a government is only as good as its people"works both ways, right? A person is only as good as its government and, in this case, ours is not an ant but a grasshopper (why store away for the future when we live in an age of Terrorism and extreme weather? Tomorrow you could be gone, people, so it's time to support the economy, buy more shit and and let 'er rip!).

5. Spend more time on the internet and watch more television.

Human interaction is for the birds, Grandma, wake up! In '06, I hope to communicate with the masses in an even more alienated and nihilistic fashion.

Blogging is a good start.

On the Question of Forgiveness

2005-12-16T12:23:00.000-08:00

So the Terminator-Governator denied Stanley "Tookie" Williams clemency and he was put to death earlier this week - killed by lethel injection given to him by the State of California. His crime? Williams killed 4 people though he maintained his innocence throughout. Additionally, he was one of the founders of the notorious and violent Crips gang in Los Angeles but, from what I've read, dramatically turned his life around in jail and began to write anti-gang books. Basically, a story of redemption but his rehebilitation, apparently, fell on deaf ears or, rather, came at a time when Arnie is feeling politcal heat and felt the need to throw the seething right-wing masses (how many are there in Cali?!?) some good ol' fashioned red meat.

Reading about this case brought up a couple of disturbing questions/observations about these United States at the beginning of the 21st century. Has anyone else noticed that the more "christian" our country becomes the less forgiving it is? The more godly our nation becomes the more hellbent it is on extracting revenge in the crudest, most savage ways possible. Are we sublty practicing an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth type of law? According to pollsters 68% of the population believes wholeheartedly in the death penalty so, I suppose, St. Arnold could forcefully argue that he was merely carrying out the will of the people.

Now, I think this is a particularly interesting case because, obviously, this man, Stanley "tookie" Williams, from all appearances, had made a legitmate turn around, had changed, had tried to to redeem himself or had redeemed himself but...what is the point of redemption if the culture won't recognize it or has lost the capacity to forgive? And, isn't forgiveness at the heart of Christianity?

EVICTED

2005-12-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

I meant to write about this a few weeks ago but in the post-Thanksgiving rush forgot. While I was in Portland over Thanksgiving in between tipping strippers and gawking at hunky Kurt Cobain look-alikes (all of whom, true to cliche, seem to work in coffee shops) I also went to see "Rent." I almost felt like I had a duty to see it, being that I am an aspiring New York Boho-Thespian (albeit one that is far more jaded than the characters that belt their way through adversity in Jonathen Larson's "Rent." I should, apparently, take a cue from the characters in "Rent" and sing my way through the Darwinian struggle of living in New York City but then I'd probably get arrested). First of all, I hate to say it, because I like a lot of the "message" behind "Rent" and some of the music is really, fun, clever, moving etcetera, etcetera. But (ahhh, yes, the invetiable "but") this musical has not aged well and it seems, just ten or fifteen years after its debut at New York Theater Workshop, horribly dated.

The premise of the musical is, essentially, the story of eight artist/bohemian types who struggle to live, love, and create in the East Village during the height of the Aids epidemic. The storyline of Puccinni's "La Boheme" is thrown in there somewhere but "Rent" is not a strict reinterpretation of the opera. Not only do the earnest hipsters of "Rent" struggle with the H.I.V virus, they also face the onslaught of gentrification that is about to make their affordable housing (er, free housing) in the East Village (the EAST VILLAGE!?!) a near impossiblity. Now, I think, watching "Rent" in the era in which the East Village is the playland of junior executives from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, who roll up and down Avenues A,B and C in two hundred dollar "Seven" jeans, drinking $15.00 mojitos, talking on cellphones while their thumbs move swiftly and expertly over Blackberry Keyboard interfaces, is quite differnt than watching "Rent" in the early 90's.

The earnestness of "Rent", the goodwill of these hipsters with a cause, the "love will save the day" message that underlies the musical seems, at this point, slightly cringe inducing because it rings so ---hollow. Also, for better or worse, the disease, AIDS, that really gave the musical it's sense of gravity is, now, something that has come to be thought of as only deadly to...poor African countries. I don't think the musical is helped by the fact that the movie is directed by one of Hollywood's great hired hand/hacks, Chris Columbus. The man responsible for "Mrs. Doubtfire", "Stepmom" and the first two clunky adaptations of "Harry Potter" to name but a few of his Hallmark inspired ouevre.

His camera knows no grace and the scenes never soar or seem...filmic, actually. The fact is film is not theater and the film adpatation of "Rent" could have benefitted from a little nip and tuck (it's far too long, with one ballad too many) as well as some editing panache. It gets neither and the camera remains static and worshipful throughout which kills whatever flair was inherent in the score. Oddly enough, by being too reverential of the original stage production of "Rent" the movie has no life of its own and just seems like a weaker, cornier version of what thrilled so many audiences in the theater. True artists (the kind the character in "Rent" aspire to be) know that sentimentality is the enemy of good art but Chris Columbus seems to only know how to direct in mawkish pastel tones. Even the Drag Queen in the movie version of "Rent" comes off as PG-13.

This "Rent" is nothing that a junior Executive from Goldman Sachs would object to, in fact, after viewing it, it'll just make the East Village all that much cooler, now that, you know, "those" kinds of people are not actual residents there anymore (they all left for Red Hook in '93 cause they couldn't afford the ____). La Vie Boheme, indeed.

Now that you've trashed the place, leave.

2005-12-09T11:56:00.000-08:00

I went out last night with a friend who I haven't seen in a while. We spent the first half of the evening catching up on our, respective, lives. Engaging in the comforting back and forth of "how are you?", "how's your job?", "your lovelife?", "your complete lack of a lovelife?", "your family?", "what are you doing for Christmas?", and so on and so forth. After we had talked about what had been filling our days and evenings since we last saw each other since summer (hard to believe it had been almost 5 months but that's how friendships often function in New York -- sporadically) we moved on to talk about, you know, the incredibly bizarre and genuinely terrifying state of the world.

Perhaps, because it's the end of the year or because I spend many hours of my day being bombarded with information (of my own free will, mind you) I have lately been more dismayed than usual by the utter shittyness of the news. Joyce's qoute about history being a nightmare from which he was trying to awake strikes me, now, more than ever to be totally relevant and reading the newspaper is becoming a truly stomach churning affair. It's curious too, I feel the more information I absorb, the more powerless I feel. Especially reading, hearing, or seeing news about the war in Iraq which, day-by-day, seems more and more like a genuine hell on this earth with the Pentagon unable to entirely censor the images of exploding buses and smoking mosques.

Not to be a total Debbie Downer but looking at the world and feeling any kind of hopefulness right now would take a few esctasy pills and a fifth of bourbon. I have to admit to being slightly depressed even if it is the "most wonderfulllll time of the yearrrrr" and I know I am getting a long covted for i-pod for Christmas (finally a tried and true member of the Born to Buy generation). Now, I must also admit that I have, as of late, been nursing a slight fixation on the Baby Boomer generation, the generation raised by the "Greatest Generation", the generation that gave us George W. Bush but also Bill Clinton, the generation that gave us Oprah Winfrey, and Steve Jobs, and Katie Couric, and Ken Lay to name just a few. A boomer was anyone born post-World War II when western Europe was dragging itself out of the mire and the U.S. economy was booming from all the toasters and nuclear warheads it was making and selling.

For the record, the Boomers gave us the S.U.V and the i-pod, and Wal-mart and our feudal 21st century economy of Warlord/Shareholder and Serf/Service Employee and with it the end of pensions and the shredding of any social or civil contract put in place during the Great Society. I am going to be bold and unforgiving and say: I don't like the Boomers very much. They were born (en masse) and they partied (en masse) and they trashed the planet (en masse) and now they are going to try and stay as long as possible (en masse) and and we, their children (who are fewer), are going to be here to clean up their mess.

They are like the world's worst party guests and we will be picking up their trash and cleaning up for a long time after they've left.

Harumph. Needless to say, hope springs enternal (and who am I to doubt that cliche) but mine has just taken a quick vacation. I hope it returns in time for the New Year.

Twin Peaks

2005-12-02T09:33:00.000-08:00

I went to lovely Portland, Oregon for Giving de Thanks. I went primarily to visit old friends who moved to this tarnished jewel of a City from San Francisco ( which is just an outright jewel). My image of Portland prior to my visit was that it was another well-to-do Pacific Northwest mid-sized City that was the benefactor of Nike dollars and Tech industry largesse but, boy, was I wrong. Portland, actually, has one of the worst job markets in the whole country and my friend Korey, who has a fine Master's Degree in Library Science, has been relegated to working at a car dealership temp job located 30 minutes outside the City. He is doing well by Portland standards but, needless to say, he is, now, moving back to San Franciso -- evergreens, no matter how gorgeous, and beer, no matter how tasty and micro-brewed (Potland has a lot of both) are not reason enough to stay in an economically depressed town.

The City plays host to an odd assortment of hardcore Hippies with a well established anti-corporate ethos and Slacker-Granola Punks still sporting flannel and vintage t-shirts a la Kurt Cobain plus, right-wing militia types who preach the words of Jesus and the gospel of the N.R.A. There is no sales-tax in Portland and ballot intiatives to increase funding of schools and whatnot have, usually, failed so there are no civil or social services to speak of. Apparently, the City is so strapped for cash the Police Department doesn't have a computer system and there is a rumor that there are only two snow-plows for the whole town so an inch or two of the white, sticky, stuff shuts the town down.

Not to be terribly crude but speaking of the white, sticky, stuff - Portland has an incredibly vibrant, uh, Adult Entertainment industry that fits into the whole Wild-West, Anti-Tax, Anti-Gub'ment, environment. Fantasy Video is a peep show/porn-store that's big enough for the whole family. Dancing Boys? Check out the Silverado where the men strip for other men (and the few women who love them enough to be dragged out to a gay strip bar: me!). The men taking it all (and I mean all) off were suprisingly good-looking (they had all their teeth) and so hair-free and shiny that comparisons to Ken Dolls would not be far off the mark. They shake what their Mamma gave them to get tipped by men in baseball hats decorated with logos of bald eagles and American flags or a short brunette with a crimson face (again: me).

The only industry besides porn that really seems to be booming in Portland is the manufacturing and distribution of Cyrstal Meth. It seems that meth has become the moonshine of the 21st Century with small rural communities turning to household cleaners that, mixed right, can be turned into a nasty drug that is both a relief from boredom and enconomic desparity. It's entirely possible that the clapboard house tucked neatly into the side of that mountain is a fully functioning meth lab. Hopefully, the people inside know what they are doing because if they don't Grandma's falling-apart Victorian is going up in flames. This is "Our Town" for the 21st Century where tweaker-drug dealers compete with preachers for the soul of America. I saw more than a few people on the streets of Portland who had, obviously, done a little meth -- the manic chin wagging is always a dead giveaway.

However, Portland (and the state of Oregon) is an icredibly gorgeous place and the native Oregonians, to their immense credit, have managed to stave off the rapacious development that mars so many other rural states. No Wal-Mart or Home Depot complexes cut into Oregon's awe-inspiring natural beauty and, bravo to a community that puts it's Mom and Pops and it's environment ahead of a short-term economic boom.

I am glad I got to see where Lewis & Clark forged their trail and you can still imagine how wild and beautiful it must have been untouched. Oregon, wild Oregon, with its evergreens, waterfalls, streams, mountains, meth users, and strippers, all perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

Poetry of My Own

2005-11-23T10:03:00.000-08:00

Since I am so snarky about other people's written words, namely poetry, I thought I'd put my own rather feeble attempts on the perverbial chopping block. Most poetry I write, like most people, comes out of soured relationships but I will spare the two (close friends) who are kind enough to graze my site with their eyeballs. These are about the general absurdities of every(day) life.

fabrications

small, white, lies

escape from my lips

like pearls

falling

they come bouncing down to the floor.

rolling around on the ground

these meaningless fabrications

slide around my feet

making shinier

my lovelife or my carrer or my age

whatever particular insecurity

manifests instelf that day.

though i'll try not to step

on one of these small, cracked jewels

i know eventually one will get caught under my shoe.

i'll wind up on the floor

looking like a fool: my dress torn, my hell broken,

scrambling to get up, my mouth wide open.

yours

on a porch one cold summer night

listening to stories

of your memories.

tales of people i don't know

history, so much, history.

names that signify something to you

but not to me

laughing on cue, sighing when need be, crying if you want me to.

above all - i am listening

to your past being glorifed, the present seems to terrify.

The CYCLOPS

2005-11-17T12:15:00.000-08:00

I don't have television and not because I don't, sometimes, really crave a comfy night at home in front of the flickering blue lit box. I miss my "ER" and I would love to, occassionally, veg out in front of the pretty people who break up and make up and then break up and make up on "The OC". I'd like to have Jon Stewart deftly guide me through the new's of the world with humour and insight. However, I don't have the box and no overriding desire to go out and buy the box so my television viewing is severly limited. I'd like to think it's absence, generally, makes me a happier and saner person too.

However, I usually end up watching the television when I am at the gym because, god forbid, you just, you know, excersise. At my gym, Crunch, there are, at minimum, twenty televisions blaring and flickering as people run on treadmills whirling and stairmasters squeaking. The usual fare playing is, generally, MTV on one channel and CNN on another. At any time, you can look up and see "Laguna Beach" on one set and Lou Dobbs on the other reporting on "Broken Borders" and the "Disappearing Middle Class" or TRL Live on one set by a Headline News update on a soldier's death, just one more carnage filled scene of a roadside bomb in Iraq. Needless to say, it's a very, very odd mix of the frivilous and the fatal.

Last night, as I was doing my usual cardiovascular routine, feeling the "bbbuuuurrrnnn" in other words, when I looked up and caught a clip of the Cyclops, Dick Cheney, giving a one-eyed speech attacking the Democrats for questioning his rationale for going to war. He really is beginning to look more and more like that monster in Greek mythology who lived on an Island and, basically, terrorized citizens, with its rage and its one eye. It was really incredible to watch him give this speech, green bile coming out of one side of his mouth with his one squinty eye boring holes into the soul's of men. Everytime he speaks, I swear I see snakes and toads come slithering out of it but then I remember it's just the well-crafted lies that are handsomely cloaked in a rhetoric of rigtheousness and fear.

As the years pass, five to be exact since George Dubya Oedipus took office, the country seems to be living is some giant real-life, real-time version of The House of Atrius. Don't you wish someone would just hand Junior and Cyclops-Cheney a copy of a Sophocles play and tell them to read it? Their hurbris is so-over-the-top it almost seems like dramatic fiction. This Christmas lie to your children and tell them if they don't behave Dick Cheney will kill Santa and deliver coal to your door. The Cyclops would wholeheartedly approve of your manipulation; he knows sometimes you have to lie and terrorize to get children (and adults) to behave themselves.

Big Grinchin'

2005-11-15T12:23:00.000-08:00

Another reason to hate Christmas -- Getting a job posting sent to you by well meaning friends that reads something like this:

"Macy's seeks adults ages 18-40 to play Christmas elves. Must be under 5'5 and love children."

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

2005-11-14T08:59:00.000-08:00

Soon, the airwaves will be filled with commercials for Macy's and Target instructing us (us, the American consumer) to get ready for the mooooost wonderful tiiiiiime of the yeeeaarrrr. The most wonderful time of the year for retail giants, like Wal-Mart and the like who are, now, predicting their fourth quarter earning profits, mouths-a-watering with forecasts of what the numbers for "Black Friday" might be. Cable news anchors, supremely coiffed hair moving nary an inch, will report if "consumer confidence" was up or down this year. Starbucks will sell gingerbread lattes and Bill O'Reilly will devote large segments of his informative, fair and balanced programming, to the widespread attack on Christmas.

Ahhh yes, when I see the giant Christmas tree go up in plainview at Rockerfeller Center and every major department store decorated like some sort of oversized Candy Land board I cannot help but think that Christmas is, clearly, doomed. Of course, anything Bill O'Reilly does or says at this point can be promptly filed under "parody". It really is too bad Saint Nick can't come crashing down upon his fat-head but, sadly, father Christmas is probably too busy being taken to court by those anti-Christmas meanies, the ACLU, and, heretoforth, is being prohibited from shimmying down any chimneys to deliver toys. Thank baby Jesus we have a serious man like, Fox news contributer, John Gibson to list the widespread attack on Christmas and the endless indignities so many Christians will, no doubt, face next month.

Don't believe Christmas is getting the shit kicked out of it? Read this, America:

Yes, Virginia, there is a war on Christmas. It’s the secularization of America’s favorite holiday and the ever-stronger push toward a neutered “holiday” season so that non-Christians won’t be even the slightest bit offended.
Traditionalists get upset when they’re told—more and more these days—that celebrating Christmas in any public way is a violation of church and state separation. That is certainly not what the founders intended when they wrote, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
John Gibson, a popular anchor for the Fox News Channel, has been digging up evidence about the liberal activists, lawyers, politicians, educators, and media people who are leading the war on Christmas. And he reveals that the situation is worse than you can imagine. For instance:

• In Illinois, state government workers were forbidden from saying the words “Merry Christmas” while at work
• In Rhode Island, local officials banned Christians from participating in a public project to decorate the lawn of City Hall
• A New Jersey school banned even instrumental versions of traditional Christmas carols
• Arizona school officials ruled it unconstitutional for a student to make any reference to the religious history of Christmas in a class project
Millions of Americans are starting to fight back against the secularist forces and against local officials who would rather surrender than be seen as politically incorrect. Gibson shows readers how they can help save Christmas from being twisted beyond recognition, with even the slightest reference to Jesus completely disappearing.
The annual debate will be hotter than ever in 2005, and this book will be perfect for everyone who’s pro-Christmas.

No one likes it when their friends forget their birthdays and all you atheists and jews beware: Jesus is gonna be mad when he comes back and finds out you were trying to shut down his birthday party. And, if the Jesus who comes back is anything like the one described in Tim LaHaye's "Left Behind" books you are in for a major ass kicking: the son of God will take one look at you and your face will explode, then your blood will curdle and melt. I am not making this up, in fact, the books apparently go into gross detail about what happens to unbelievers after the rapture, and it sounds like a scene most fans of slasher and gore movies (you know, the ones that are sullying our nation's youths?) would die to see. In fact, the Left Behind series, with it's uplifting scenes of a thousand year war and an ultra-violent Jesus who lives not to forgive but to avenge might be the perfect gift to give this Christmas.

I know, I know, Jesus is the reason for the season but it doesn't hurt to buy, buy, buy too especially if it's from your local Mega-Corporate Christian Publishing house. I doubt Pat Robertson or Tim LaHaye would discourage their Christian flock from, say, shunning gifts altogether and just, you know, celebrating the birth of Christ with nothing but prayer, no presents, no chintzy decorations, no elaborate show, just simple remembrance and a deeply personal day of faith.

But, wait a second, that doesn't sound like Christmas!!?!?

La Vie en Rose

2005-11-08T12:53:00.000-08:00

I am one of those Americans that Henry James was talking about when he said "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris." Luckily, I have already been to the City of Lights and, in fact, lived there for some time and, subsequently, have gone back to visit. The most time I spent there was as a jeune-fille au-pair before I started college. I lived with a real live French family that did eat two feet long baguettes every night and had cheese after every meal and I looked after their two enfants terribles, a boy and a girl. I had French friends, a French boyfriend, studied at the Alliance Francaise and, generally, had , the quintessential "Girl Abroad" experience. It was a memorable year and I left with a great love of France in all it's sophistication, and beauty, and, yes, in all of it's arrogance, too.

Now, even when I lived in la belle France over ten years ago (loathe as I am to admit I am actually old enough now to say things like "over ten years ago") there were signs that this was a culture in the midst of a major transition. I can remember hearing many of my French aquintances and some of my French friend's mutterring about "les arabs." "Les arabs" were to blame for everything from crime and unemployment; les arabs were to blame for someone being rude to you in the supermarket; "les arabs" were to blame for the coarsening of their society; the other, the uncivilized, "les arabs". Funny sentiments for a country that has, traditionally, prided itself on tolerance and, often, chided the United States on it's ugly history of rascism. Afterall, France was Josephine Baker's escape and Nina Simone's final resting place (not a surprising choice for a woman who sings about"Missippi Goddamn!!!"). My parents who lived in Paris from 1968 to 1971 recall that they were often asked by the French about the ugly spectre of American rascism.

Now, right-wing pundits in this country are already sneering and wagging their fingers and, gloating, that now the French have their own "muslim" problem. Don't listen to them. The fact is that after World War II, France had an economic resurgence for about thirty years, those years are called "Les trents glorious" (literally, translated to mean "Glorious Thirty"). In a nutshell, there were not enough workers in France during the Post-war boom years so the French solicited workers from their former colonies, namely Algeria. The French, by all accounts, were brutal in Algeria and most of the other North African countries where it planted its flag so, you can imagine, that there is already a legacy of resentment in these places towards their former rulers (read George Orwell's "Shooting the Elephant" about the insidiousness of colonialism or just look at the news footage of American troops in Iraq). Now, all these North African immigrants have moved to France to work, and when the work is there it's fine, but, eventually, the boom turns into a bust, and unemployment rises and suddenly there is a sizeable immigrant population. You know what comes next, right? The resentment sets in and the mainstream population begins to whisper "Get the fuck out" but...sorry, it's a little late for that.

By now, all of these immigrants have moved to France, started families, live in slums (les banlieus) outside of Paris, and are regarded with bitterness and distrust. Their kids are born into a country that, essentially, doesn't want them even as it claims to uphold the mantle of "liberte, egalite and fraternite." In short, you have a country with a naked case of xenophobia not unlike what we have here with Americans shouting about the illegals taking good jobs (or, shitty jobs that no American, quite rightly, wants to get paid $5 an hour for. Too bad we don't blame the greedy corporations and not the desperate workers but that's another blog entry).

The situation in France, as far as I can tell, is the burning, seething, anger that the children of these immigrants, born in France, feel toward their birth-country. The kids of the banlieus (the slums) are an uncomfortable hybrid; they don't feel French but are too western to feel Algerian or Morroccan. Now, it is naive and just plain dishonest to simply chalk this up to another case of "Islamic extremism" as if it were a virus that is airborne and not caused by other mitigating factors. Obviously there are other mitigating factors which I've just described - the legacy of colonialism, the politics of globalisation, the rise of fundamentalism, the failure of modernity, all of these get ignored, completely ignored, by the opinion-makers in our press, researchers in think-tanks, neo-cons and the like, who simply boil it down to "jihadism."

I wish it were that simple. Don't believe me? Check out some of these statistics:

Despite the large number of Arabs and Muslims living in France, there is not a single Arab or Muslim politician in the French parliament.

Or what about this? (A recap of what I described).

The only story that obtains here is that unrest began as a reaction to the suspicious deaths of two teenage boys who were fleeing the police yet had done nothing wrong; it intensified after a mosque was tear-gassed; and it has spread as Sarkozy has barked out veiled threats and insults. Further, eyewitnesses suggest that the police are deliberately provoking violence.The backdrop is not mysterious either. These kids are growing up in squalid banlieues, where their parents and grandparents were deposited upon arrival. Doug Ireland notes that they are in France largely due to state and industrial policy. During the 1950s and 60s, when France was experiencing an economic boom, a policy was initiated to recruit from the former colonies labourers for menial and factory work, because two successive wars had killed off much male labour power and lowered the birth rate. There was a similar policy in Britain: it was Enoch Powell, he who later drowned in rivers of his own froth, who encouraged residents of the Commonwealth to migrate to the United Kingdom and take up roles in the NHS. Generations of largely North African Arabs were abandoned to the banlieues, pushed to the bottom of every available pile, blamed for being there.

Now, I don't support the rash outbreak of violence. I certainly wouldn't want to come out of my house to see a masked teenager torching my Peugoet. However, I don't think human behavior or history for that matter can be neatly sliced up into little categories of "good" and "evil." I hardly think, Bill O'Reilly should bloviate about the French and their problems when we have so many of our own. Sorry, Bill Bennett but I don't think white, western, judeo-christian societies hold the moral highground in the world.

What's the solution? I don't know and I don't think anyone does, not anyone who is a nuanced thinker anyway, and that's the very scary reality of the world we live in right now. I guess you could say that this is a case of history repeating itself or as the French might say "la plus ca change, la plus ca reste la meme" (the more things change, the more they stay the same).

C'est la vie, non?

If you see something, say something.

2005-11-04T07:48:00.000-08:00

We've all been there, right? In those public spaces, a mall or a supermarket browsing the aisles, when you notice a child severly misbehaving (because that's what children often do) and you see a parent smack or scream at their offspring in such a violent, uncontrolled, rage-filled manner that it leaves you slack-jawed. Mouth agape you wonder: what should I do? Should I say something? Should I call the police? Should I interfere? Sometimes there's another single, childless, adult in the supermarket with you who has seen this bit of domestic violence play itself out by the cereal boxes and you both catch each other's eye, all brows furrowing, wide-eyed, you silently acknowledge what you've just witnessed, reading each other's minds, both thinking: should I get involved in this shit or just grab my Grape Nuts and run?

I, sad to say, more often than not take the coward's way out. I walk by the parent who has just, visibly, lost it, glaring at them, passive-aggressively telegraphing that I do NOT approve of them pulling a Joan Crawford in the SuperFresh. But, I've seen too many incidences of people interferring in a parent-child moment and getting yelled at by the mother or father and being told, rightly or wrongly, to mind their own " goddamn fucking business." You could say I'm a little hesitant to get involved; afraid, I will get my ass kicked by this parent like their five year old just did.

This morning on the subway, a mother and daughter got on the 6 train going uptown, a very crowded rush-hour train. A good-natured passenger stood up and gave the child his seat and the mother pushed her daughter onto the plastic subway seat, a little more roughly than seemed... normal. Then the mother instead of protectively standing in front of her little munchkin, her baby, turned away and ignored the kid. I silently take stock of this scene because I am standing right next to this odd little family duo. I notice the other passengers have noticed that there is something slightly off about this little family. One other passenger, in particular, is rolling her eyes, and, passive-agressively staring at the mother in a way that I find all too familiar because I realize I am probably doing the same thing.

A few stops go by when the kid starts to yell "Mama, Mama, Mama" but, Mama, looks to be having some kind of minor breakdown and continues to ignore her child, covering her face with her arm, looking like she wants nothing more than to lay down and just give up.

The community on the train looks confused and the feeling that, obviously, prevails is: what should we do? I am spared the moral dillemma of "to get involved, or not to get involved" because the train has reached my stop and so I leave. I leave as most of us do, knowing we saw something that wasn't right, but didn't have the courage to say something, didn't have the time, couldn't because it was too inconvenient, or might get ugly and "really who am I to interfere?"

And, as I march to work, trying to shake off the image of this unremarkable but disturbing scene, I can't help but think of this Philip Larkin poem:

This Be the Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself

Hmmm, Do I sense a theme here?

2005-11-03T09:12:00.000-08:00

Suddenly, the Bush administration has a new raison d'etre: the bird flu. Now, I am hardly suggesting that this isn't a genuine threat and there was an excellent article a few months back in the New Yorker about the possible devastation that the avian flu could cause (this is fascinating but, apparently, most pandemic flu's originated on the Asian continent) if it spread worldwide.

However, it is hard, post-Iraq war, after being repeatedly lied to, and manipulated a la George Orwell's 1984, by this group of Thugs to believe anything they have to say. Everything seems like it's being manufactured and endlessly spun to distort, distract, and strike fear into the hearts of men.

Cockle-doddle-doo: Libby's nothing not when the sky's falling down or so says Commander Chicken-hawk-Little Chief.

Always the Bridesmaid...

2005-10-31T07:49:00.000-08:00

I am getting to that age (an age which I will not, in print, specify) but that age in which friends start getting married and having babies. Some of my friends skipped the getting married part and went straight to the babies; others would like to get married but can't because they don't live in Massacusettes, most of western Europe or Canada; then there are some going for the semi-traditional full-on wedding parade/extravaganza.

Because I do have friends, goood friends, who are doing the whole pomp n'circumstance, wedding thang, I am proud to announce to the citizens of Blogdom that I am going to be a bridesmaid! I only hope I will look half as attractive as the bridesmaid in this random picture I found on google. My bridesmaid's duties have already begun when I was semi-indoctrinated into the secret rituals of the bride this past Thursday. My friend, Shoni, (the bride) and I went to a pre-registration event at the superstore, Bloomingdales, hosted by none other than Vera Wang, wedding dress maker par excellence and Media mogul of all things matrimonial.

First of all, I don't often go into luxury stores like Bloomingdales because I don't want to be reminded, floor by floor, of what a pauper I am. Generally, I think I am relatively happy and don't want for much (the operative word in this sentence being "relatively") but when I entered the gleaming expanse of Bloomies, with it's shiny cosmetic counter and their huge jeans department selling pants for a cool $200 a pair, my mouth started watering like a Dickenisian orphan. I silently start calculating how many paychecks it might take for me to come back to Bloomies and buy jeans that fit my ass like a glove and are branded oh-so-delicately with a giant squiggly line on the pocket. Suddenly, I don't give a shit if the jeans department of Bloomingdales probably has profits higher than most third world country G.N.P's. My ongoing (vocal) critique about the wasteful materialism of our society is completely forgotten as my eyes scan all the amazing looking shit that is for sale in this otherworldly store. Going up the escalator to check out the flatware, I have a bird's eye view of the furniture department and all I know is that I want to belong to the ownership society. I want to own stocks; I want investments; I want to be a shareholder; I want property; I want in.

We make it up to the floor to look at all the goodies the brides and their beloveds can register for, all the while being attended to by the various representatives of Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Kate Spade, and, of course, Mistress Vera Wang, all of whom design homeware and whatnot. The representatives look like your atypical New York Power Players: blowdried, board straight hair, stilletos a la Carrie Bradshaw, pants or skirts that show off their carefully sculpted pilatefied bodies, and nails that have been pedicured within an inch of their lives. I can't help wishing I hadn't worn tennis shoes (with holes in them no less) and my backpack, while practical, strikes me as retarded plus, I keep fearing it's going to knockdown a display of Kate Spade Paisley patterned dhina.

Shoni, the bride, is the picture of calm excitement as she lobs softball questions at the designer vulture/merchants who are each trying to sell her either toasting glasses ("these are absolutely essential at any wedding, there's always a toast, the best man toasts, the parents toast, and these toasting glasses are made of sterling silver so when you take a picture of the toast they will look beautiful. People don't realize that toasting glasses are really important") or a platnum wedding cake knife which is also, "absolutely imperative." They are absolutely serious, so serious, in fact, I'd swear they were talking about homeland security and not something to scoop cake onto a plate.

Looking around, I can understand the excitement and the appeal. In fact, I am beginning to feel a lot like Charlie Sheen's character in Wall Street; all that is missing is Michael Douglas whispering "greed is good." I think this has more to do with being in Bloomingdales than it does with being a Bridesmaid. I don't even think Shoni is going to register at dear old Bloomies, thank god, because if I spent any more time at that store I'd turn into a lil' Leona Helmsley. I even contemplated trying to get an MBA or finding a husband that does...

What a Difference a Year Makes.

2005-10-27T11:36:00.000-07:00

It's almost the anniversary of your re-election (though many remained convinced that both of your victories are dubious, at best and that is certainly true of the first win. I am less prone to believe the conspiracies about the second because I think you won that through a masterful manipulation of pure fear and bigotry).

Only a year ago, I went to Philadelphia with my 71-year old father to campaign in that mythical Battleground State. The whole election boiled down to the mood of the people in a few land-locked states (and their questionable voting machines). My father, with his barely concealed despair and rage, at what you had done in your four years to the country already. His sheer disbelief that it was even possible that his fellow citizens might conceivably re-elect you. You, who are the opposite of everything my father, the son of immigrants, pitifully poor in his youth, who worked tooth and nail to educate himself, who put himself through school, who joined the foreign service and represented this country for 35 years, and did it all through sheer force of his own will. He could not stomach the thought we might elect you again. You who are the son of wealth, and the beneficiary of cronysism and sophisticated greed. You who never got anything by virtue of your own merit and never seemed to be curious about anything but oil, baseball, and jesus. You, the CEO President. You, Mr. Tough Guy. You, the Paper-Tiger Sheriff brandishing a big stick. You terrified and medicore man. You who should have stayed in Midland, TX, with your pretty wife, and healthy twins, swimming, barbecuing and waiting for the oil revenues to trickle in.

Only a year ago, we stood on a windy street corner in Philly half-heartedly holding beaten up Kerry signs (a man we supported out of total desperation) and got honked at and cheered on and it seemed like the end of this 4-year national nightmare might be near. And my father, joked, that if you won again it might be time to head up north and look at real estate in Montreal. He sounded more like my friends who almost spit with fury saying "I'm fucking moving if he gets re-elected again"then a retiree. Then my father and I parted ways right before election day, I going back to New York and he headed back to his upscale cul-de-sac in Maryland (the spoils of a lifetime of government service). And he told me to "hope for the best" and that "it looked good" but that there would "always be Montreal" in the worst-case scenario.

Only a year ago, I remember getting back to my apartment as the results came trickling in. I chose to spend the night, alone, on the couch, without alchohol which was probably a mistake I realize now, getting phone calls from frantic friends, calling me in panicked disbelief when Florida, legitimately this time, got called for you.

Only a year ago, I was wrestling with the fact that I was living in a country that had just re-elected Darth Vader (Dick Cheney) . I can remember feeling totally defeated picking up the phone to call my dad whose voiced cracked saying that Kerry could still win, Ohio was up in the air and that he had not conceded and I, knowing it was over, cried. My father reiterated that we could always escape to Montreal. I remember I told him the website for Canada had already crashed because of so many hits.

Only a year ago, my inbox was full of emails that kept being circulated, the one that had a map of the United States as two countries: the United States of Canada and Jesus land. There were articles and blog entries detailing vote rigging and the first person accounts of Republicans goons shaking down every black community in Ohio. The anti-red state Southern bias that was spewing out of the my fellow Blue state dwellers; it felt like there was a new Civil war but this time the North was going to lose it.

Only a year ago, you came swaggering out, your face gleaming with new found legitmacy, your administration a weapon of mass gloating, proudly proclaiming that, now, you had "political capital" and you were "going to spend it." Big balls were being planned in your honor and Pat Roberston would be there doing a jig, that radical evangelical swell that had carried you to victory would be sure to cash in on your poltical capital. And then there were the rest of us, nearly traumatized, preparing ourselves to see 50 years worth of progress and protection get ripped up and thrown aside.

A year has passed and look at you now. I bet you think to yourself, after a day of putting out fires, horsely reiterating that you don't want to cut and run as the American death count hits 2000, and your supreme court nominee gets pummelled because even she can't satisfy your reddest, red meat base, and your prized advisor, your architect, your own dear Dirty Trickster looks at an indictment. Are you as shocked as I am at how you've fallen apart? Do you think "I wish I'd stayed in Texas and just raised the twins, gotten another job from one of Dad's friends and stayed the hell out of politics?"

You must think "what a difference a year makes, huh"?

2005-10-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

Poetry Night

2005-10-21T07:14:00.000-07:00

Last evening after a long day at work, mainly on the internet consuming utterly useless information, I went to a poetry reading organized by a friendly aquintance of mine, Elaine. It's been a long time since I have been a room with other consenting adults listening to other consenting adults reading their poem. It was wierd. I am being honest here, because I am finding that blogging is this wierd marriage of journalling and performing. Plus,I just read this delicious and profound and hilarious play/book by the late Spalding Grey called "Swimming to Cambodia" and his unflagging honesty was fucking brilliant and bold and hilarious. So, I am taking a page from Spalding's book and just saying whatever the hell I want (on the net, that is).

So, poetry night. Have you ever noticed how so much of perception is based on context? I know, I know that is almost pathetically "stating the obvious" but I really noticed it last night. Suddenly, because it was a poetry reading all the men there seemed a little...fey or super crunchy (GRANOLA) ish. They all seemed to be wearing earthtones and I counted a lot of khaki pants and more than a few patagonia jackets. The women all seemed crazy kind of like Sylvia Plath (without the mythology or Ted Hughes or Gwyneth Paltrow movie) I must have looked crazy too. Everyone there seemed to have graduated from the University of Michigan or the University of Wisconsin, Madison and I got the feeling that they all ride bicycles on the weekend and prefer foreign films. It all felt a little...staid.

The poems and the readers (there were two) were fine and, when I wasn't thinking about whether or not I should eat dinner or just skip it and have a big breakfast tomorrow instead, some of the poems were catchy. A lot of modern poetry suffers from what the rest of modern art suffers from: the inability to take the individual experience and make it grander and more universal and more fantastic than just the outpouring of psycho-babble. So, there was a lot of lines about "in our apartment when the sun was shining and burnishing your skin and you were incased in glass. Remember your fathers stripped sweater and pipe which litter the road to the canyon that we looked out onto." One quickly tires of description followed by adjective followed by description: all allusions to the storminess of the writer's childhood or love life. Hardly any of it rhymes either which if I am going to be completely candid, a la Spalding Grey, I have to admit bugs me.

I love poetry though and I wish it weren't relegated to crazy-Aunt-in-the-attic status. When you go into a bookstore, the poetry section is usually banished to a corner like the porno videos at Blockbuster - just out of sight, a dirty little fetish meant only for adults. I was always particularly taken with the Romantics - Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake and their crazy love of nature, and their crazy love of love, and their love of revolutionary enlightnment and their love of enlightning drugs - the rock stars of the 1800's. I wished, at times, last night there could have been shots of absinthe and wild runs between overgrown hedges with poems being recited in between the fields of untamed grass but, uh, there was no absinthe just complimentary shots of Bailey's Irish Cream in Dixie cups and no grass except for the kind being sold outside the nearby soup kitchen on the corner of 40th and 9th.

So, here 's to poetry of the yesteryear: to words more fierce, more dear, more bold, more clear. Here's to you, Mr. Blake, up in heaven, drinking all of God's wine,
Now a ghost still writing poems, wild, whimsical, and, divine.

Laughing Song by William Blake

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;
When the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene;
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing 'Ha ha he!'
When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread:
Come live, and be merry, and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of 'Ha ha he!'

The New Yorker's Art and Architecture Issue.

2005-10-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

Now, I don't want to hear any snipping about how the New Yorker is actually a middle-brow magazine catering to the petty bourgeousie: it might be but I love it. I think the writing is really, really clean and clear, often, witty and other than their lamentable endorsement of the Iraqi war, which was written by David Remnick but ghostwritten by the American Enterprise Institute, it's a great magazine. Afterall, it has Anthony Lane as their movie critique and he is, in my humble - no one reads my blog- opionion the best person writing about (mass) entertainment/art today.

Last week was the special "Art and Architecture" issue and it was both infuriating and depressing and a reminder of how much bad art (and architecture) clutters the landscape. I am less knowledgeable about architecture than I am about art (and I am dilletante-ish on that, even) so the articles about architecture caused me less consternation than the ones on art and artists. Once piece in the issue that really caused me to clutch my forehead and wag my head was on the artist Rikrit. Let me qoute from the piece (and, no, I promise, this is not a page torn from an old Mike Myers draft of the Sprockets sketch on S'N'L). Here goes:

"Called Untitled 1990 (Pad Thai)." People who came to the opening found Rikrit at a cooking station in a small room adjacent to the main gallery, making pad thai and serving it on plastic plates. Quite a few visitors assumed he was the caterer. According to Randy Alexander, who worked with Paula Allen and had invited Rikrit to show there, "Rikrit's idea was just to leave everything as it was, so the detritus of the opening was the formal work people would see when they came into the space the next day. We had a concern about the olfactory presence of rotting food, but because of the spices he used it never went beyond obnoxious."
Alexander was impressed by Rikrit. "His gestures, his style, his elegance all became part of the piece." he remembers. "But at the same time he had this casual, funny, normal side. I never heard a critical word about him from anyone, and in the art world that was pretty unique." Later that year Alexander started his own gallery, Rikrit was the first artist he showed. For this one , "Unititled 1990 (Blind)," Rikrit offered a voice-activitated tape recorder, a pair of binonculars on the windowsill, and a floor strewn with discarded envelopes containing audiocassettes that Rikrit had recorded, viewers could make use of these items or not. Alexander served Rolling Rock beer at the opening, because he could get it at a discount. "Rikrit liked the bottles," he remembers. "I stacked them up in their original cartons and we made a piece of it."
The effect that Rikrit and his work have on some people is not easily explicable. Gavin Brown, who came in one day, was working then for Lisa Spellman at the increasingly influential 303 Gallery, but he thought of himself as an artist- he had gone to art school in London. Something about the four cases of stacked green bottles pierced his soul. "It irritated me so much!" he remembers. "Beer bottles in their cardboard cases, all empty tops off. It wasn't like a found object - there was so much more to it than that. I could feel this in waves, even though there was almost nothing to it. It was an object that seems to say 'You don't seem to realize how little everything else matters.' I couldn't get it out of my head."

Now you might be wondering who would be rich, bored and misguided enough to, say, buy Rikrit's "art". As if this article wasn't already reading like parody then wait, it gets worse:

"Some of his cooking untensils from the early shows were starting to sell. I wondered how Rikrit felt about that: if the work was suppossed to be about social interation, what did an unwashed wok that he'd bought and used once have to do with it" "I didn't think it through at first", he told me, "but then I realized, yeah, there was a problem. What I do now is ask people to use what they buy. Cook a meal, invite people to eat with you, have your own experience. The value and the meaning are in the use." Eileen Cohen, a collector who began buying Rikrit's work very early, gave a party in her apartment last spring to "reanimate" a cooking piece of Rikrit's she had just acquired. Three handomse stainless steel pots stood on pedestals, over propane stoves, cooking three different kinds of dumplings - mild vegeterian, not-so-mild veal, and highly spiced beef. I also saw a wok from one of Rikrit's first pieces, crusted with ten-year-old shrimp curry, displayed on a shelf in Cohen's library, next to a Hopi ceramic pot."

It is actually hard to know where to begin to pinpoint how many things are wrong and downright laughable about this article and, more to the point, that state of art, in this case, visual art in the 21st century (at least in the western world). First off: this is not art and no amount of rationalizing by the purveyors of taste will convince me otherwise. Yes, it might be a "cool" experience, and a "neat" installation and the artist himself sounds really "nice" and "super cool" and not likely to cut off his ear anytime soon but this is not work that will be remembered by anyone in half-a-century's time; except, maybe the rich offspring of art-collectors from Manhattan.

This article is about how the petty tastes of the individuals, or really the EGO, masquerade as art. Now, Picasso, according to all accounts had an ego like a mad bull but the man was an unbelievable genius (I just recently visited the Picasso Museum in Paris and his body of work left me gob-smacked; the sheer virtuousity that one person was capable of). Picasso's paintings and sculptures do not require instructions or cooking materials and while they speak to his personal experiences (as all art does, right?) they are not just "cool", self-referential, found objects/experiences that are, essentially, meaningless. There is nothing particularly universally meaningful about four cartons of stacked beer bottles with no caps on unless, maybe, you've lived in a frat house or go to a lot of cheap art openings. The Rolling Rock beer bottle installation is not art, it is just an attempt to find meaning where there is none plus, it's skilless, lazy, and, above all, boring. Yes, trash can be beautiful and meaningful, Bob Rauschenberg has an amazing body of work made from bazooka wrappers and car tires but that was thoughtfully put together, stacking up beer bottles after a party is not. Soon this "art" will be thrown away, afterall, Time acts as a great garbage collector.

Cupcakes and the Bourgeousie.

2005-10-14T09:11:00.000-07:00

On the weekend for extra dosh I work at a Cafe (which for the purposes of this blog I will call "Cafe" lest I get fired for writing incriminating things) which is a rather lovely place, actually. It is just another one of the small businesses that make New York a great town: a place where, if one has enough capitol, creativity and ambition you, the individual, can own a small, unique, store. Basically, it's not some giant chain, where all the stores look the same from New York to New Dehli (I am thinking, of course, of Starbucks which I don't entirely hate because they give their workers, EVEN part-time workers, healthcare so they are off my conglomerate shit list). At the cafe I work at we don't call the customers "guests" with fixed grins and magic kingodom happy faces and we don't play appropriately hip worldmusic to enhance the consumers intake of coffee and cupcakes (the bedrock of what this cafe sells). We just, you know, sell cupcakes, make coffee drinks, take money, serve people but not in a way that would suggest we are running a quasi-spa and not a cafe.

However, many of our customers don't realize that this is not a spa or that I am not their personal maid service. I posit that customer service is one of the last arenas that Americans feel it is acceptable to exhibit all of their bigotry and it is a great microcosm of the American class system. The only thing that really seperates me and the customer is a glass case with cupcakes but they are on the other side brandishing cash or an American Express black card and with it a huge sense of entitelment and a really ugly air of moneyed superiority. When I open my mouth to speak I get the sneaking suspicion that they are surprised that, well, often I speak better than they do, am wittier, and, yes, probably have a liberal arts degree equal or greater than theirs. It doesn't matter to them though because with cash or plastic in hand, on the other side of the glass incased fence, they have the power. So whatever has been going wrong in their lives, the job they hate or the child they thought they wanted or the pounds they've put on or the loveless appearance oriented marriages they are in, have a sudden outlet.

They can misdirect all of their frustration (read: anger) at the chick behind the counter who hasn't gotten them the right cupcake! "No, I wanted the pink flower", "Why don't you have any more chocolate vanilla", "How much is that?!?" and on, and on, and on. Sometimes, if feels like a hundred Veruca Salts have been let loose and they are all asking me for an Oompa Loompa. Oftentimes, my interactions with the Fat-free Pilates toned Mommy crowd or the Mr. time is money Man turns into a passive agressive exchange that takes on the quality of a Harold Pinter play (random aside: Pinter just won the Nobel - Go Harold!). The simple act of my serving and theri buying a cup of coffee or cupcake becomes a power play fraught with subtext with "that will be $ 2.50" really meaning " that will be $2.50 you cheap, classless, bastard" and "large or small" becomes "large or small you spoiled fatso." Sadly, I am on the losing side, behind the counter, and, until Americans learn that money isn't a liscense to treat others like identured servants, than serving will continue to be an exercise in sadism.

On being friends with Republicans.

2005-10-13T12:17:00.000-07:00

I am close to two people, yes, only two, because I don't necessarily count my grandmother or my boss as friends, who voted for Bush in the last election (or, the Stephen King title might be..."The day the map turned blood red"). These are two people who's company I, genuinely, enjoy and find charming, two people who I think are, essentially, good people, nice people, worthwhile, smart and caring people who I keep in touch with and email and see occassionally for a beer and invite to my shows and to parties at my home, people I share anecdotes with about my life and their lives, in short, two people who are friends of mine.

I try not to talk about politics with these two Republican friends of mine but, inevitably, the conversation drifts to the (my) latest outrage of the Bush admininstration, and the whole corrupt bunch up there on Capitol Hill oiling and sleazing there way around the legislature. So, despite my best attempts to talk about work or their (occassionally) my significant others, the latest series on H.B.O. and the merits of microbrews, what books or movies we've digested lately ivariably we end up talking about what I so strenously had tried to avoid talking about, namely, Iraq and the whole stinky Republican agenda.

Now, I, on the one hand, hate talking about politics, specifically, Iraq, with these two, rather nice, Republican neo-con friends of mine because it saddens and frustrates me. It saddens me because to my core, to the edges of my toes and my fingers, in my bones and deep in the wellspring of my soul, I believe this war is a goddamn disgrace . Everytime, I read about our endeavors there, of the car bombs exploding, and the marketplaces marred by suicide bombers, of the children needlessly dying, and the leveling of Falluja and countless other Iraqi towns, of the incepient civil war, the secterian strife, and of our own leaders who blindly insist, like broken records, that we are making progress I feel a deep and burning and helpless sense of shame. Shame that I am, through my tax dollars supporting the Pentagon war machine churning without end and that there is really, and truly, short of evading the I.R.S, nothing I can do about it.

My two Republican friends of mine, strongly support this war, and believe it to be just and, more specifically, necessary to the future of the world, I supposse, and to the safety and health of these United States. We huff and puff at one another, each side, trading memorized facts ("there were no WMDS", "Yes, there were or we haven't found them", "What about the yellowcake?", "They found the yellowcake", "Occupation in post-war Japan wasn't easy either", "You cannot compare Iraq to Japan post-World War II", "They took us to war on a lie", "Everyone, including the Democrats believed the intelligence", "We either fight them there or here", "What the hell are you talking about? Iraq had NO terrorirsts before this war", "Saddam was a brutal and evil dictator", "There are a lot of brutal dictators in the world", "Read this article in the Nation", "Read this article in the Weekly Standard" and on and on ad nauseum) but no one leaves the conversation with their worldview changed in the least. Truth be told, there is even a slight thrill in having a real live Republican to vent my digust to who isn't a blood relative but...that thrill quickly loses it's appeal after the 6th feckless conversation.

Instead, I leave the debate, a little angry and disturbed that they see the world so differently than I do and that there is almost nothing, nothing, I can do to change these Republican, neo-con friends minds and, I am sure, they feel likewise. I wonder how to proceed with this relationship and if there is a future but I remember that I like these two friends of mine. I would be lying if I said I don't sometimes scratch my head and wonder if it might not be better to adhere to that old saying "never talk about money, religion or politics" and that's easy enough to do these days because all three are virtually interchangeable, right?

Maybe I'll ask these two Republican friends of mine.

Mind-Boggling Tragedy.

2005-10-13T07:57:00.000-07:00

This is when it becomes obvious how paltry(?) or meagre language is...when you have to grapple or deal with tragedy. I am speaking about, of course, the mega-diasesters, Katrina and, now, the earthquake to hit South East Asia. I don't even know how you begin to fathom or put into words the realization that with a single, cataclysmic, shake, thirty thousand people perish under houses and rubble (this is the estimated number of people they think died in Pakistan and Kashmir and India this past weekend). I don't think you can grapple it, really, unless it is happenning to you or around you, unless you are forced. You watch it on television or read about it on yahoo news and the awfulness of it flickers in your mind and then you move on to the far more paltable update on Paris Hilton's broken engagement.

Hmm, why am I choosing to write about such depressing stuff? Honestly, because, well, I think I am fresh out of inspiration so massive tragedy seemed like the next best thing to write on. Alright, that was incredibly callous and this is exactly what I mean about not being able to really deal with tragedy and maybe even more today, in our information saturated brains, than ever.

Forgetting You.

2005-10-07T13:34:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been to H&M on a Saturday afternoon when a busload of tourists from Ohio has just been let loose in its environs? Shrieks of pleasure being emitted from every corner over how “cute” and “adorable” and, most importantly, how “cheap” it all is?!? Yes, you can snarl and feel superior to tourists from Ohio (a state for which I am hard-pressed post-election ‘04 to have much sympathy for) but the fact is...you’re there too. You are at H&M pawing, and, mauling your way through the cheap shit, too. Your eyes scanning the sheer tops that would look so cute with those black pants you have or the chunky brown belt that would dangle oh-so-alluringly over that flowing white skirt you bought last week completing your vision of boho-city-chic.

The music soothingly pumping out and numbing any worries over whether you should, in fact, really charge this “made in tawain/romania/turkey/latvia/estonia/or the perennial favorite: china” crochet tank top. In the midst of picking and choosing, making your way through elbows and arms and coos of “oh that looks good” you forget about whatever was bothering you earlier that day: the recent break up, the fact that you miss him, the energy its taking not to call him, the job that demeans and drains you, the realization that your parents are, now, senior citizens, the knowledge that this world you inhabit is just getting uglier and more complicated and that the leaders in charge of safeguarding it are too craven and ill-equipped to lead it, all of it fades into the background when you are trying to decide between floral or leopard print.

After you’ve picked out your six items you take your place with the rest of the seething masses, standing behind the gum chewing teenager in her jeans a la Britney and her eager to please Mother (who is trying to give her daughter everything that was denied to her in her own adolescence). Like Catholics taking the eucharist (or the “wafer” as my own mother called it) you inch your way to the fitting room - one step at a time. Finally, after shifting from leg to leg and glaring at the tourists from Ohio you get a fitting room; a small mirrored sanctuary where you can model those chosen wares for your own discerning eye.

The world falls away and all that’s left is you, the mirror, and the decision over what looks better/sexier/more sophisticated/the most flattering/the most desirable on you, on your body. The blinkers are finally on and you have a goal - the rest of your worries are just white noise. Now, isn’t this what you came here for? To H&M on a Saturday? Admit it: you came here because it’s an oasis, you came here to forget, you came here for a little peace.

Arrested Development

2005-10-07T13:27:00.000-07:00

Ladies: be wary of any man who, past the age of 18, tells you their favorite book is "Catcher in the Rye". This, in no uncertain terms, is a blazing, blarring, impossible to ignore, RED flag and you can be rest assurred that this is a guy who is lost in a state of perpetual adolescence.

Yes, we all loved Holden Caufield, that Upper West Side "Igby goes down" underdog. Holden Caufield, literature's favorite fuck-up, the rich kid with a heart of gold who can't quite get it together. The kid who gets kicked out of every boarding school forever disappointing his lock-jawed, well heeled, New Yorker parents. And, yes, how can you not love a teenage boy protaganist who counts his kid sister, Phoebe, among his most prized and beloved confidants? I loved the book too...when I was fifteen.

But, guys, it's time to move on. You are not Holden Caufield anymore or even remotely in his age range and to continue to identify with a confused teenager and hold that book on a pedestal speaks, transparently, to your own inability to, well, grow up.

I bet you can't commit to anything but mixed cd's.

So buck up and get yourself down to the Strand. Commit to finding a new favorite book and, yes, I'll let you off the hook: you can choose a Fitzgerald or a Hemingway as potential replacements. Or, even, Nick Hornby will be allowed. I'd say check out Johnathan Franzen too. Get ready to kiss Holden Caufield and "Catcher in the Rye" goodbye because it's time to put away childish things. Get ready to scrub the use of the word "phony" from your vocabulary.

Sure, you'll miss Holden and his lovable mistakes but missing people and things, objects, and places is part of growing up (which devotees of this book should know). Afterall, Holden learns that growing up is all about letting go (read the last paragraph of the book - tear stained no doubt as you pack it up, heeding my advice, knowing it's time to become, well, a man and finally graduate from high school). Believe me: acting your age can be liberating. And, don't take offense: what if you dated a chick who told you her favorite book was still "Forever" or "Are you there God, it's me Margaret?

Spinning in Butter.

2005-09-29T13:36:00.000-07:00

After sitting shackled to this ergonomic chair and keyboard like some 19th century prisoner for much of the day; hunched, immobile, listless (you get the picture) I like to end my day running on a treadmill in some wierd outburst of frenetic energy (think 70's gerbil wheel and you've got the picture).

I belong to Crunch Gyms (hey -- no "judgments" is their logo) and I dutifully go everyday to watch the free cable and atone for the sins of my flesh. In addition to the medevil excerise machines ("stairmaster" sounds like pre-enlightnment torture device to me) and the weights there are also a range of "fun" and "fresh" classes designed to make you forget that you are actually excersising. Usually, these classes involve an obscene amout of jumping around to a smattering of selections from every kind of "popular" music played so loud your brain starts to feel like a bad euro-trash disco. But I , like most of the other people in the class (READ: 20 to 45 year old WOMEN) am happy to actually feel that my arms and legs do work after a day of sitting motionless.

The other day I decided to take the epic plunge and try the spinning class which is like a Jane Fonda aerobics routine all done, get this, atop a bike. Imagine an excersie class designed by methamphatimine addicts and you kind of have the idea. You enter a darkened room, which is designed to look like an abandoned disco with bikes where the dance floor should be. After adjusting my bike to fit my respective height - mine, it should be noted, is set so low Frodo could have used it ride to Mordor - I begin to comfortably pedal and get ready for the class to start. The bike is oddly fast and I worry that when I begin to sweat I am going to come hurtling off it. I begin to have visions of telling my friends I got in a STATIONARY bike accident.

Brushing off this worst-case scenario, I nervously look around and get ready, feigning confidence, as well toned women with sculpted biceps and steely glints in their fat burning eyes take their place around me. Suddenly an instructor wearing a hands-free, head-set mike, is shouting to "SPRINT" which is, apparently, my cue to pedal like a 13 year old chasing traffic. The superwomen around me morph into Lange Armstrong crack addicts; their kneecaps look like dangerous killers. I am glad I don't have prosthetics because I feel at any moment one of my legs is going to detach itself from my hip and go flying into the middle of the ...dance floor? No one else seem to share my concern and they pedal, spinning away their calories with a commitment I am not sure if I admire or find terrifying.

This goes on for 45 minutes. By the end we have gone "uphill" and "downhill"; we have done push-ups on the bike, and a bit of yoga and I am sure, at some point in this class, I forfeited my ability to have children but, what the hell, right? My knees might not work when I hit 35 but my body is that much closer to being fat-free.

Tick-Tock

2005-09-19T12:35:00.000-07:00

LIFE ON LINE (As I know it).

9:00 - Get to work (nameless/faceless/soulless temp job). Turn on computer.

9:05 - Check work email. Return work emails. Use words in email like "Per your request" and " Please find the enclosed attached" and "Do not hesitate" and "if you have any questions."

9:30 - Check my hotmail/yahoo/earthlink/ personal email. Lament the lack of emails from friends/dates/parents. Decide I need to meet new people and curse my friends. Wonder if I have become a major bore/dullard?!?

9:32 - Go to NYTIMES.com in attempt to keep up on current events. Read Paul Krugman and agree with everything he has to say. Wish I could date him. Shake my (metaphorical) fist at the Bush administration and everything it does. Swear at the picture of our frat boy asshole President and crony of Good Ol' Boys. Wonder what the world is coming to. Leave NYTIMES site feeling depressed and slightly hopeless.

9:45 - Need to feel frivolous. Go to Eonline.com and look at pictures of Paris Hilton. Wonder what the world is coming to. Leave Eonline site feeling depressed and slightly hopeless.
10:00 - Answer phones and fax and go on a Starbucks run for my boss.
10:30 - Come back and decide I should be helping refugees in Africa not making coffee runs for a grown man.

10:40 - Log on to http://www.peacecorp.org/ site. and look at requirements. Read description for "Waste Managmenent in the Developing World" project. Wonder if this requires extensive work with Port-a-Pottys? Imagine good times (filled with meaning, filled with hope) helping women and children in Uganda. Am (rudely)interrupted by boss and told to fax stock transfer sheet to client.

11:00 - Send out mass email to friends urging them to sign Moveon.org petition asking Congress not to approve one of Bush's rightwing nut job judges to the supreme court.

11:05 - Wonder if mass email was a mistake? Wonder if I am blocked on friend's emails?

11:15 - Stuff envelopes

11:25 - Think about why I got a liberal art's degree.

11:35 - Go to NYPOST.com and read the latest news on the whereabouts of Madonna, Gwyneth, P-Diddy, and Beyonce.

11:38 - Shake my head at the celebu-freak world of news. Vow to never waste time reading such trivial infotainment again.

11: 45 - Read report about Nuclear proliferation on the Council on Foreign Relations website.

11:55 - Wonder why more people can't be as informed as I am.

11:59 - Extremely bored.

12:00 - Debate whether or not to send Ex an email.

12:30 - Regret sending Ex an email.

12:45 - Wonder if I should eat lunch at Subway?

1:00 - Tell boss am going to lunch.

1:10 - Order a turkey supreme at Subway. Decide to get "Baked Lays" with sandwich and a root-beer soda.

1:20 - Sit in front of Morgan Stanley building with other temps eating Subway.

1:25 - See roving bands of corporate assholes wearing blue shirts talking about their weekend in the Hamptons. Wonder what the world is coming to? Finish lunch feeling depressed and slightly hopeless.

1:30 - Contemplate not going back to work.

In the Beginning

2005-09-19T11:36:00.000-07:00

Here we go (I hope I don't humiliate myself too much).