Saturday, June 12, 2004

Astoria Mystery



See this? This is the central intersection of Astoria, Queens- the intersection of Broadway and Steinway street. Huge amount of car traffic, huge amount of foot traffic. And yet, Steinway Street (named, I believe after the Steinway piano guy), has a different sign above it "Bob Stern Way." It seems to have been professionally attached to the street pole, and it's been up there for over a year. But it sounds like a prank- Steinway and "Stern Way." And yet if it was, how has it stayed up so long.


Anyway, I'm going to research it using 311 and possibly some guys who know Queens history, and get back to you all with the first investigative report of "Tell the Truth and Run." I know you are all waiting with baited breath.

Oh, and I didn't go to the rap thing I mentioned earlier- just too tired.

Friday, June 11, 2004

IT horror story of the day

I'm an IT Administrator at a small manufacturing firm. I'm dealing with two broken laptops, both of which belong to the same engineer. One of them, new, has occaisional freezes. The other has a busted hard drive. I ask him at one point whether the newer computer stops freezing if he waits long enough. He says, "No, but if I grab it and shake it up and down, it sometimes works." Suddenly, I know two things:

1) Why the hard drive is busted on the older computer.
 
2) That I've actually found a real life version of this famous Dilbert cartoon, from back when Dilbert was funny.


Tuesday, June 08, 2004

Shpatzirin

Those wishing to stalk me on Thursday can find me at the Shpatrizirn "Hip-Hop Machers" event at Sara Delano Roosevelt Park. The event itself is described on the Nonsense New York Mailing List as:

Tonight, Shpatzirin presents Hip-Hop Machers, with
performances by Akil Dasan and Vanessa Hidary, followed by a
screening of Joey Garfield's Breath Control: A History of
the Human Beatbox.

Hip-Hop Machers examines the dynamics between Jewish and
hip-hop cultures. The performance program presents Akil
Dasan and his band with a reading by Vanessa Hidary. Both
Dasan and Hidary have straddled the color line as they have
been perceived as non-Jewish by their peers. Dasan will
perform with his band and has offered to read a poem
entitled "Black Jew". Hidary's work explores issues of race
and ethnicity, and her own experiences as a Syrian-Jewish
woman growing up on the Upper West Side interacting with
black and Latino communities. Joey Garfield's Breath
Control: A History of the Human Beatbox is remarkable in his
ability -- as a Jewish filmmaker -- to access the key
players in the elusive cult of beatbox culture within the
urban landscape of New York City. The film includes an
interview with DJ Yuri Lane who is currently performing a
new beatbox musical, From Tel Aviv to Ramallah.


In truth, I have no idea if it will be any good at all. I am going mainly because the yiddish word, Shpatzirin, which I only discovered through this listing. It means "a stroll without destination," and at it's best, that's how I feel my life in New York is. I probably would have named my blog Shpatzirin if I'd heard the word in advance.

I'll see if I can grab any photos of the event.

Tired

No new posts today.

Also Blogger appears to be acting up again.

Monday, June 07, 2004

Something's up

Friends report (and I've seen just now) an unusual number of cop cars with
lights on the streets today.

Sparky's Office Song of the day

BTO-"Takin' Care of Business"

Boss Post

I answered this in comments, already, but figured I'd post it here to boost my word count and increase my chances of getting fired:

Alyssa asks
Is your boss's name followed by a "cute" nickname like "the tuna" or "the knife" or anything like that?


No. We used to call him Valchek, back when we were giving the entire office secret nicknames based on characters in The Wire (this backfired amusingly in a story that I will tell in maybe five years or so.)If I had to describe him, I couldn't do better than to steal Pauline Kael's description of Bob Hoskins in Mona Lisa: "a testicle on legs." Also he spends a lot of time running through the halls yelling "Bullshit!" in an Israeli accent.

What happens if you try to quit? Have you ever heard from other co-workers again?


Someone was threatened with: "You'll never work in this industry again! You'll never work in this town again! You don't know who I know!" but the threat was not capable of being backed up. My friends and I are going into our exit interviews, once the blessed day comes, wearing a wire, but he hasn't had said too much of interest to the last few guys.

Gerry Potter

Saw three films this weekend: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban, Dead Man, and Gerry. Everybody I know whose seen Dead Man seems to have seen a second time and done a 180 on the film, so I'm going to leave my comments for now at "meh." It was someone else's dream that I didn't particularly feel invited into or wanting to go to. It may be that Rosenbaum and Hoberman are right, and it's the greatest film of the decade, but there's a self-congratulatory air to the casting of the oddballs populating the scene (putting Iggy Pop and Robert Mitchum in highly visible nothing roles in the movie seems to say nothing more than "I know Iggy Pop and Robert Mitchum.")

As for Harry Potter, it's amazing what a difference a good directory makes. Cuaron makes the world of the film seem both like the product of a cleverer imagination, and more organic. There's not a feeling of highly talented British actors (and kids) hamming it up on sets out of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, but of a real organic world following it's own eccentric rules. And the actors feel alive in a way that they didn't in the first film (I didn't see the second). David Thewlis, as Professor Lupin, is particularly good- he summons up a whole host of memories of sympathetic teachers in shabby clothes and vaguely disappointing lives. Everyone tired of fake looking digital creatures should take a look at Buckbeak the hippogryph who really feels substantial and alive and animal-like. But the main thing is Cuaron has such a sympathetic yet objective eye for his teenage characters, that like in Y Tu Mama Tambien, he doesn't make any special pleading for them the way Columbus (and sometimes Rowling) have to.

I still haven't seen Gus Van Sant's Columbine film Elephant, but Gerry was on the Sundance Channel this weekend. If you haven't seen it, it's a near dialogueless film starring (sort of) Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, as two guys- both named Gerry- who go off into a desert that looks somewhat like Death Valley for a "thing" and end up lost, wandering aimlessly around without food or water. For most of the movie, neither of them seem upset or angry or worried or much of anything. They're frequently shot from a distance- there are only a few close ups, and rarely do we see both their faces clearly in the same frame. The relationship between the two of them is never explicated-are they lovers? friends? brothers? some sort of play on the Matt'n'Ben relationship?- and there's not a sense that Van Sant wants us to experience the characters as characters or as representations of something else. They're simply figures moving through the landscape. Van Sant keeps everything on a human level that normally occupies the foreground that tamped down and vague (like a Harold Pinter Comedy of Menace without any menace. Or, except for some brief improvised dialogue, comedy) while the background nature, stark and characterless (there's no sense of an interaction between the Gerrys and their environment) occupies most of the frame and our attention. This may be the most boring thing ever to you. To me, it was oddly fascinating, but fascinating like a particularly brilliant screensaver. The landscape never seems to make sense- Van Sant gives you no shot where you can get your bearings on the surroundings, or even connect one shot with the next- at one point they're on a brilliantly white surface that looks like an ice skating rink, but there's nothing nearby that looks anything like it. Van Sant shows some shots of time passing represented by cuts to speeded up views of clouds passing overhead some mountains somewhere, but we never get a sense of how long they've been in the desert and how near they are to dying of exposure or dehydration. The mood of dead desperation that he summons for an hour and a half is so seductive that I found myself resistant when Van Sant fianlly switches things up, showing hallucinations and tears on the faces of the characters, and finally, at the end, some drama, but the emotional impact is incredible at the end, and somehow he's able to make us feel an extreme amount of tenderness for what were stick figures throughout the film. In the final close up on a character's eyes, you feel like you can see the entire dead world he inhabits inside him.

Nothing at all


OK, I know I haven't updated for a while. But you don't want to read about me having my carpet steam cleaned (a surprisingly inexpensive process) or alphabetizing my DVDs, or the flirtatious smiles back and forth with a pretty girl that went nowhere at CafĂ© Bar, or why I'm playing hooky from the playwrighting group tonight (you can probably guess that one.) I've already bored enough of my real life friends with the carpet cleaning story.  And I haven't got the energy for transcribing my latest fight with Gloria. So, later on, I'll put up some stuff about the new Harry Potter movie and Gerry, which I just saw on the Sundance Channel this weekend. Now, I have to work.