Tell the Truth and Run

The Crazies

2010-09-19T11:27:00.004-04:00

I saw the original The Crazies last night on Watch Instantly. It's harder to ignore the things that fans of Romero (to be clear I count myself as one) brush aside, when you can't tell the difference between characters infected with a homicidal virus, and those who are just over-acting. One of the most interesting elements of the film, how some of the people infected with Trixie become non-violent flower children who are promptly mowed down by the army, gets no play in the dialogue at all. It's spawned a million critical essays, I'm sure, about how the film was a microcosm for the curdling of the 60's non-violent protest movement, but it never really gets explored.

Guiliani and 9/11

2010-09-19T10:48:00.006-04:00

I disagree with a few points on Phil Nugent's otherwise excellent post about Guiliani's popularity waning. Rudy's popularity didn't come to a "crashing halt" when he suggested that we could push those petty mayoral elections back a bit. He was ignored, and there were procedural reasons why he couldn't have done it, but the press still lionized him, and he still was the Churchill of 9/11 to everyone, myself included. I'll continue to credit him with keeping the city and possibly the country from descending into chaos that day. My guess he would have won that initiative if it was up to a popular vote.

And even though Bloomberg opposed delaying the elections, he still plastered the airways with ad after ad toting a suddenly very valuable endorsement from the mayor. since everyone was glued to their set watching either 9/11 coverage or the World Series, Bloomberg had a great captive audience and basically a monopoly on the airwaves. And Green, after screwing up everything else, decided to go nasty against Bloomberg about the allegations of harassing staff members to get abortions, and it backfired massively.

Still with all that (and I'm not even going into Ferrer), Bloomberg won a squeaker of 2% and was treated as an accidental mayor. That's certainly how I viewed him until the power outage, when his calm, dull, bureaucratic voice was just what the city needed.

It's easy to lump Guiliani in with Bush in retrospect, but the bloom really didn't come off the rose until the Kerik nomination and he continued to poll very highly until he actually started running. And even before 9/11, he was the guy who brought the crime rate down lower than the national average. A lot of people were wondering if it would shoot back up once he went away. There was a feeling that the city needed to be ruled by a belligerent semi-tyrant, having memories of nice-guy David Dinkins not keeping the peace. Liberals who were not at the wrong end of police brutality comforted themselves with the fact that he was socially liberal on issues from abortion to welfare reform, in some cases to the left of the Clinton administration.

I may have forgotten some things or gotten them wrong. I moved to New York only a year before Phil, so I wasn't actually in town for most of the Guiliani years. This spawned out of an email I wrote Phil last night, which he asked if he could post, but I decided to use this to see if I'd restart blogging. I'll probably move to Tumblr or something, since most of my insights aren't really worth a full post.

Watch this space.

2010-04-24T11:49:00.003-04:00

No, really.

In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important peepers

2007-08-26T10:37:00.000-04:00

I rarely get a smile from the ads on the subway. In fact, I'm most disturbed by how out of date they are, promoting shows and museum events that have long closed, and bragging "Did you ever think you would be able to use your credit card to buy a Metrocard?" But yesterday on the way to PS 1's penultimate warm-up I saw a public service announcement for organ donation telling me that upon his death Jerry Orbach had donated his eyes to medicine.

I'm not creeped out by the fact that two people now have his eyeballs. For some reason, it's oddly comforting, like Lennie Briscoe is still looking out over the city.

Edit: It seems someone has beat me to the punch on this one by many months, and she's funnier too. On the plus side, I've found a new blog to read.

Dear fellow straphangers,

2007-07-23T21:04:00.000-04:00

You can't actually read Harry Potter on the subway. I don't care how anxious you are to see how it ends, or how little other time you have to read, but it doesn't fit on the L train during rush hour, and you certainly can't open it up standing in the middle of the passage without the cover hitting some one's nose. Do it again and I'll spoil the ending for you.

Pretend this was written on Wednesday

2007-07-18T16:38:00.000-04:00

So Gili guilted me into starting to write to this again.

Chicago Vacation: The litany of what what went wrong that trip has become a comic routine:

I got my flight delayed for a day and half
I accidentally insulted a deaf lesbian's shoes and spent the next hour apologizing
I got a hang over.
I got a cold, and had to go through endless humiliation and bureaucratese to get at the good stuff so I could lay in bed for the day (the pharmacy had to take my name and adress, but only half the keys on the keyboard worked, so if they want to track down my meth lab, they're stuck trying to write a warrant for Ivi Ohchi (which I think will be my samurai name.)
I threw up in a taxi cab.
Some guy threatened to kill me at the wolf house in the Chicago Zoo.
The apostrophe key broke on my keyboard, and even Carlos couldn't fix it.
Ellen was unironically obsessed with Dippin' Dots, the ice cream of the future.

And yet, it ended up with a great trick, and I feel like a shadows lifted after.

Reading: Ulysses, of all things. Gili said to me last night that it's a guy thing to be obsessed with it, and for me it was a teenage boy thing, just like waiting for facial hair to grow. It's the big monument of 20th Century, the book so difficult that its guide is longer than the text itself, a back breaker that sums up every bit of Western Civilization. And it's dirty. It's banned. Somehow I had missed the fact that it was banned in the past, not now, and made a determined , Pierre Menardian attempt to get it instated at my high school library. Also I tried to read it, with that guide longer than the book, looking up every reference in advance of reading it so I would obtain some sort of perfect knowledge. I got somewhere through Chapter 3 and then would start over a few months later.

Anyway, I'm reading it now, and I'm realizing back then I should have been reading the same way I could laugh at Annie Hall and without knowing what a Mah Jongg tile was, or on Mystery Science theater, where I found the juxtaposition of Spalding Gray and Gamera hilarious without having heard of the former. And if anything gets real tough, I can google it- every word in Ulysses seems to be explained on Google somewhere- but I don't even think I'm supposed to know a third of what Dedalus is muttering to himself on Sandymount Beach. The struggle with it is part of the fun.

Gili and I finally met up and saw the amazing and peculiar St. Vincent, but the real thrill of the night was looking at couples across the bar and trying to guess their relationships or what they were fighting about through body language. I think I bored her too much asking "And what about this author? Do you like him? How about her?" And I launched into my dreaded Singing Detective monologue.

Listening to today: I'm took advantage of having an office to myself and played all of the Drive By Trucker's "Southern Rock Opera" while coding. Now it's Lucinda Williams on shuffle. I want something mournful about the past, with a little anger (or really anything that distracts me from work problems and my drenching clothes.)

Over the past few weeks, I saw Ratatouille and Once. I don't really want to talk about either in detail, I got an eye on the clock right now for dinner with Lendri, and need to copy edit this later, but they both are incredible and unexpected explorations of artistic creation and the role of the artist in society.

Breach

2007-03-31T10:01:00.000-04:00

Breach is so good that it's intensely frustrating when it goes dumb and predictable and becomes a standard spy move. Billy Ray, the director, is carving out a nice little niche for himself on true-life institutional thrillers, where half the crime is the bureaucracy that allows the central psychopath to flourish. To some extent, Breach is stronger than Shattered Glass, his previous film about the New Republic, because it isn't restrained by a need to embellish the goodness of real life figures for greater access. At the same time there's something missing from the movie's core.

The story of Robert Hanssen(Chris Cooper) is partly a psychological portrait of how a devoutly religiously and incredibly intelligent FBI agent ended up selling incredible secrets to the Soviets. For the first half hour or so the movie bristles with life as it watches him push against the FBI bureaucracy to reform the antiquated networking system, simply steal unallocated new computers off palettes rather than fill out requisition forms, and sneer at the gun culture that's keeping the FBI in the 19th Century. The movie is set in February of 2001, and though 9/11 is never directly alluded to, the FBI's failures hangs in the background. The other protagonist, Ed O'Neill(Ryan Phillipe), begins the film eavesdropping on an un-named middle eastern couple having a public fight. He's pulled off within the first few minutes to work with Hansenn and we never learn if they were connected to terrorism or just an angry couple on the streets, but the point is quickly made that he's a frustrated reformer as well. It's also glancing alluded to that he doesn't know a word of Arabic.

O'Neill is assigned as Hanssen's assistant, with vague instructions to watch him because he's accused of sexual deviancy. And for a while it's a thrill just to see Cooper treat Phillipe, whose grown into his looks but still has a little bit of an unearned pretty boy expression, as a nuisance and a rube, and without special pleading or begging, get him to understand the source of his frustrations. When Cooper contemptuously stomps through a server room and explains precisely to Gary Cole (in full on Lumbergh mode) what Linux servers are needed, what the bandwidth requirements are, and what other organizations they should be looking to model, it's a thrill. Partly because the movie doesn't throw 24 techno goobledy gook at the viewer- Ray puts as much care into making the computers accurately early 2001 as a Merchant Ivory film puts into its cuff links and parasols. And you want to see Hansenn succeed, because he does convince you, even knowing the facts of the case going in, that he cares about making the FBI into a proper investigatory unit, and somehow that's tied into his brand of Opus Dei Catholicism- which he describes as never taking the easy route to salvation.

It's when the thriller elements slip into high gear that the movie becomes a lesser thing. Eventually it's revealed that the FBI knows about the extent of Hanssen's betrayal and that the entire operation is a set-up for O'Neill to gain his trust. This leads to 2 or 3 scenes of the clock ticking while O'Neill tries to copy files before Hansenn returns to his palm pilot, or keep him distracted while agents can tear apart his car. These are scenes out of a million other thrillers, and not only does Ray not stage them with any particularly snap, but they all end the same way, with O'Neill convincing Hansenn by a show of his growing religious faith under his mentor's tutelage. (Hansenn tells O'Neill to pray more, and so O'Neill covers for being in the wrong office by getting down on his knees and reciting the rosary.) Every one of those scenes, and the arguments they have over faith in religion and trust in each other are crackerjack and Cooper and Phillipe put the perfect amount of desperation and guile into them, but they're all basically identical, and one of them would suffice.

The problem is the actual story is a character study, and not a cat and mouse thriller, but the movie keeps trying to contort itself into the latter, and its got just enough integrity to make you realize how false that is. Hanssen was found out not because of anyone's great investigative skills, but because some ex-soviet officers sold the knowledge to the American government. He didn't get away with it because he was a master of deception, but because the FBI's culture was that incompetent and trusting of its own agents (if the Good Shepherd wasn't so stulifyingly boring, it would make a good double bill). And by the time O'Neill comes on board, all the information about Hanssen's betrayal is known- it's just a matter of catching him in the act so they can get a death penalty case. That results in a silly scene towards the end where Cooper waves a gun wildly at Phillipe, and the falseness of it retrospectively infects the rest of the movie.

To his credit, Ray puts enough trust in Cooper not to write an explanation of why he spied. He presents behavior- praying, hidden camera sex tapes, standing on a desk to fix a network cable, dead drops, touch football with grandkids. Cooper makes these all blend together, and ultimately you get a sense that they're all sincere- that Hansenn doesn't see the difference between showing the flaws in the FBI's structure and selling those flaws at $50,000 a pop to Soviet agents. And although he obviously doesn't live up to his religious standards, the movie doesn't take the easy route of painting him as a shallow hypocrite. The final five word conversation of Cooper and Phillipe, shot by Tak Fujimoto to explicitly recall his work on Silence of the Lambs, is oddly touching as you seen in Cooper's eyes just how much he's failed himself.

I, uh, wrote this post months ago, but left in editing mode, dissatisfied that I hadn't captured the full feeling of the movie- of course now a lot of it has simply vanished from my mind

Clinton's Wordplay

2007-03-16T01:29:00.000-04:00

Watching the DVD Wordplay last night, I remembered why I still love Bill Clinton, no matter what I may think of triangulation or the end results of NAFTA. About a third of the way through the film, the movie covers the 1996 pre-election crossword puzzle, where the correct answer for 39 Across- "The Next President" could either be "Clinton" or "Bob Dole." Dole appears briefly, comfortable in his curmudgeonly elder statesman role, smiling that that when he solved it in the morning, he thought he would win, only to be crushed at night. Of course, we're not supposed to believe for a moment that this is true. Dole is playing the graceful loser role that he's found comfortable after his humiliating defeat. I have no idea if he does crosswords in his spare time, though my guess based on his absence from the rest of the documentary is that he doesn't. Clinton, on the other hand enthuses endlessly about the brilliance of fitting the vertical clues with either answer, and would probably go on for hours about every square on the grid. As is, he ties the crossword beautifully to a perpetual theme of his, that human potential is greater than we think. Crossword puzzles, as he expresses them, aren't a matter of elite one-upmanship, but a way that anyone can better themselves, learn to think more flexibly about the word.

The movie itself draws you into by generally presenting clues that don't rely on specialized knowledge, or vocabularly. They're answers you could get, they just give the solution so fast that only an expert could beat the movie. Or at least that's what I tell myself to keep from crying myself to sleep. It was persuasive enough as to the open spirit of crosswords that I'm going to go look up pricing plans the New York Times Crossword after I finish blogging.

If the movie has a flaw, it's that the final competition never feels terribly involving. Unlike films like Spellbound, or Hands on a Hard Body, Wordplay has no sense of desperation of driving passion to compete. With a few exceptions, all the crossword enthusiasts all seem like normal people who are just a little smarter and faster than the rest of us. Someone describes a 20 year old prodigy's competitive spirit with "Tyler is like a tiger for this" and the shot the filmmakers find to illustrate her statement seems to more prove that he's got a crick in his back.

None of that is to say that it's not still as compelling a film as could possibly be made about guys filling letters into tiny boxes.

Pandora F2F

2007-02-09T15:22:00.000-05:00

When I first used the music recommendation service Pandora in October of 2005, I was blown away by the quantum leap it made from other music sites, and how often it would surprise by playing a song I’d turn out to love by an artist I’d normally dismiss. I’ve used it on and off since then, mostly because I could never get it quite right enough to leave on like iTunes, but mostly because I’ve been in an IT position where I’ve had to police other people’s internet radio use, and didn’t want to be a hypocrite. But I’d stop by periodically and play with it, and stayed on their email list, where I got an invite to a user F2F with company co-founder Tim Westergren.

He was refreshingly blunt and plainspoken about the business and how they’re doing (in an off hand comment towards the end of the evening, he remarked that although they had 5 1/2 million listeners, they were still losing “gazillions of dollars.” ) He was also optimistic about the future, talking about a possible radio version of Pandora and of a new "random" mode, where it just started out playing music and adjusted itself based on your thumbs up or thumbs down.

The most stunning thing to me was that all of the music they play is analyzed personally, by their staff of "music experts." Darcy James Argue disputes their acumen for categorizing music here, and I can definitely attest to his concerns but the sheer scale of the project is what boggles my mind. Half a million songs categorized on 400 attributes seems like such a massive project that it's hard to see how it could scale it up. And they don't categorize the lyrics at all (according to Westergen, it's too hard to come to an objective agreement) or make any subjective decisions about the quality of what they play. Certain artists don't categorize well for recommendations- Westergen said that "Lou Reed is a pain in our ass," and they get constant complaints when someone tries to set up a station based on him.

More alarmingly, he mentioned that most the audience seemed to know but was news to me. Pandora operates under the DMCA, and cuts a large check to royalty companies every month for the small royalties it owes to every artist it plays. But half of the royalties owed to the artists never reach them at all.

Testing MacJournal

2006-09-29T17:40:00.000-04:00

Testing Again.

Not quite goodbye

2005-04-17T19:02:00.000-04:00

This blog, a full third of which appears to consist of posts apologizing for the lack of content and promises to make that up soon, will be shutting down shortly. A new blog may or may not emerge, phoenix-like, fully formed out of the ashes of the old blog's head (at a different location). Or this blog and every post in it may be systematically deleted, leaving my fans with nothing to do but to pass around bootleg printouts amongst themselves.

In the mean time, please enjoy these pictures of depressed people at Disney World.

More Live Blogging the Academy Awards

2005-03-16T15:10:00.000-05:00

Apparently, Million Dollar Baby won. More updates, as events warrant.

Possibly live blogging the academy awards.

2005-02-27T22:55:00.000-05:00

Get ready for the blog campaign tomorrow to force the resignation of Yo-Yo Ma since Ronald Reagan got less applause than Brando during the Dead People Montage.

Here Be Mothers

2005-02-09T21:52:00.000-05:00

Phil Nugent on the use of a mother's loss for political causes

Chronicles

2005-02-09T21:25:00.000-05:00

In truth, it's been about three weeks since I finished Dylan's Chronicles and a week and a half since I ended The Final Solution, and I didn't take notes, so these are going to be brief book reports, of the nuggets from each that stuck with me.

Dylan's book feels more personal than a plot outline might suggest- he dances around the big moments of his personal life, barely identifies half the leading characters, and doesn't even bother to give the names of his wife and children. There's a veil of that part of his life, and I'd be very surprised if his subsequent books lift it. But he's incredibly intimate about both his artistic influences and his creatives process. He skips over most of the large successes in his life, jumping from playing in small clubs to being shackled by the unsought position as "spokesman for his generation," to feeling completely dead and finished as anything but a nostalgia act and starting a teeth grindingly difficult collaboration with Daniel Lanois on an album that didn't really inspire a lot of affection. Dylan has a great memory for the wrong side of creativity. The strongest moment in the book is when Dylan's trying to work with Archibald MacLeish on a musical play that he knows is doomed from the start, and suddenly spies a copy of Ulysses on MacLeish's bookshelf. Dylan wants the playwright to explain the book to him, but he's aware he can't ask a single question. I don't have the book in front of me, so I'm probably mangling this, but Dylan conveys the sense of being trapped inside himself better than anyone else I can think of in the five minutes before this coffee shop closes for the night. More later.

Promises, Promises

2005-02-01T21:04:00.000-05:00

Huge amount of real life events going on combined with an unfortunate change in my travel arrangements is keeping me away from the blog for a while- but I'm going to carve out some time tomorrow to write about the last two books I read, the Amazon 99 cent sale that never happened, and the touching naivete of the Gawker Empire. Right now, I'm coming off a server crash, a crucial hard drive that exploded, and a very expensive software installation that's going nowhere, so I'm hitting the sack early.

49 to Go

2005-01-26T14:39:00.000-05:00

Eh, it's going slower than I thought. I vowed not to talk too much about personal issues on this blog, but I've having serious energy issues over the last couple of months, and have practically been falling asleep instantly upon returning home from work.

I have finished Dylan's autobiography and started Michael Chabon's "The Final Solution," which I'm perfectly aware is a novella, but I'm counting it anyway.

2005-01-25T23:48:00.000-05:00

What happens when you leave a car outside my office building. Incidentally, that is not snow - it's the stripped off paint, and some visual artifacts from my crappy treo camera.
Posted by Hello

2005-01-25T23:47:00.000-05:00

I reallly have no comment on this particular Marvel licensing effort.
Posted by Hello

50 Books

2005-01-15T03:09:00.000-05:00

You can count me in on the 50 book challenge too.

Over the last three months, I've been in middle of three or four books at various levels of interest, aware that after a few weeks of neglect on any one, I'd have to start over again:

The Known World By Edward P. Jones- Pulitizer Prize Winning novel about a black slave owner. and something I began to read on jury duty in October, was fascinated by the first fifty pages, and then became aware of the depth of committment that the book involved, how many characters I'd have to keep straight through a constantly jumping timeline, and I must have decided at some point, to give it up, to carry it with me, to intend to read it, but not take it out during idle hours. I'll have to start over with that one.
Middlemarch by George Eliot - This has been my stock answer to the question "What's your favorite novel?" since I was 17 and read it an English course, despite the fact that I had to rush through the last 100 or so pages so I could bang out a paper, and now I barely remember what happened in the book. WHat I do remember was Eliot's ability to turn an unblinking sympathy towards almost every character in the book, even if she had to stop the plot to explain how a certain character was at least partially justified in her feelings, or to caution the reader against judging too harshly. In rereading the first 100 or so pages (and yes, I'm counting both rereading and books I started last year), I find that her voice is more biting and sarcastic than I remembered, and those cautions to the reader against judging anyone have a way of plunging the knife in deeper, along the lines of "Brutus is an honorable man."
Chronicles: Volume 1 by Bob Dylan - A surprising book in a number of ways, in particular how Dylan can make free form memoirs that jump radically around just as naturally as his best songs can change subject matter and point of view midway without warning. He stays cautious for the most part, doling out little pieces of his private life mainly as a background to what he observes about the scene around him. Since this one is only in a rough chronological order, and jumps from 1960 to '68 to '87 by the halfway point (where I am in the book now,) I don't know how the remaining volumes will be structured.

Gotta sleep now. In about two weeks, my commute will change and I will have much more time to read.

2005-01-12T14:24:00.000-05:00

another test post

2005-01-09T18:12:00.000-05:00

So there's been a good deal more running than truth-telling over the last six months or so. But I always intended to restart it, the same way I always intended to get the drapes hung up right in my apartment. And now seems as good a time as any. So, a few quick notes of what you can expect in the New Year:

1. No more personal stuff. Anyone who I want to inform that I had a crappy day I probably will be informed through text messages, customized ring-back tones, twenty-four feet inflatable statues of Jennifer Garner, or a cry of abject pain across the night sky. The job stuff may pop up somewhere else on the internet.

2. No more politics posts. Technically they're weren't really many politics posts to begin with, but now, they'll be completely absent. There are plently of people who are better at (a)talking about politics and (b) dispensing links to the other people who talk about politics. And besides, I've decided that I've given up all hope in the ability of people to change each other's mind through reasoning. Almost everyoneseems to have seen the first presidential debate . If you didn't come out of there with a clear idea of who would be the best leader of the free world, and who was a surly. gibbering, dispenser of useless catchphrases, I can't imagine anything I can say that would persuade you to change your mind.

3. The offices of Tell the Truth and Run may be moving to Moveable Type, or some more hospitable ground soon. We'll let you know.

No one can read the post.

2004-11-02T16:35:00.000-05:00

And yet I can post it during the great blogging outage of the 2004 election. Or maybe I can't- won't know until I hit the button.

2004-11-01T10:44:00.000-05:00

Nothing about the election tomorrow
In truth, part of the paucity of writing on this blog is due to the paucity of Sparky material- or rather my unwillingness to use Sparky material, since about six months or so ago, he started being in my corner more re: office politics. Otherwise I would posted immediately when he started running around the halls singing "2 Legit/2 Legit 2 Quit." The appealing thing about Sparky, is as someone at the New Yorker once said about Phil Hartman, is that he enjoys people playfully deflating his ego just so he can have the fun of puffing it back up again.

Seen over the last month:
Infernal Affairs- The Michael Mann Cops and Robbers franchise, taken to the Hong Kong and, except for a few over-obvious moments, boiled down to its bare minimalist essence- it knows you've seen this sort of film before, and doesn't waste more than a few minutes setting itself up, and spends most of its running time conveying mood through sideways glances, finger tapping in morse code, and the sleek, maze architecture of the city of Hong Kong.

Bright Young Things- I forgot it almost as I watching it.

Hopefully, I will update later with the Ramones: End of the Century, Vera Drake, Sideways, and I Heart Huckabees.

Welcome to the blogosphere, here's your accordion

2004-10-20T14:16:00.000-04:00

I'd like to welcome my friend in the struggle together, CAT, or Cajun Christ, or guy who used to look vaguely like Matthew Modine, and now if you squint, kinda looks like a young Peter Krause to the productivity sapping world of blogging MOON SHOT, not that I'd know much about the subject. Go forth and read him.

I have become more animal than man

2004-10-18T19:11:00.000-04:00

The other day, I loudly and sarcastically replied, "You're welcome" to a fellow employee's unsaid "Thank you."

Advice needed

2004-09-07T13:26:00.000-04:00

I'm not a native born New Yorker, but I was getting mistaken for one before I understood that there was no 20th Avenue in Manhattan. One trait I got in common with them is that I don't have a driver's license. I kept putting it off, and now I'm taking driving lessons at 28. Any New Yorkers know of a good company to contact or should I just pick the first one in the yellow pages?

On my lunch break

2004-09-07T13:19:00.000-04:00

Not to get too personal, but I haven't been posting partly because of the low level funk I've been in the last couple of months, which seems to have been accompanied by a lot of sleeping whenever there were a bunch of options before me. Right now, I'm better, and am actually getting some insomnia as a reward for time served. It's probably coincidental that I broke out of it right after my first listening to the Bjork's unearthily beautiful new album (I know I'm saying nothing new about her here), but, if you got a sour mood and a spare fifteen bucks, it's easier than a celexa prescription.

Should have something finished on the much promised, under delivered Midnight Disease review by the end of the weekend.

2004-09-06T21:56:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the long gap between posts. I skipped the Republican Convention coming to town by attending Filemaker Developer Conference in Phoenix and visiting family in San Diego, where I confirmed the impression I had when I left there at 15- it's a hell of a dull town if you don't have a car. More, maybe on Hero, and maybe on the conference, later.

Why John Kerry will win in November:

2004-08-18T17:00:00.001-04:00

KEN LAYNE lays out the facts.

This may well be the greatest blog post of all time.

No Sparky Songs today

2004-08-18T13:30:00.000-04:00

Instead, we have an hour long concert of some guys pressing numbers
seeming at random into a very loud speakerphone down the hallway (door
left wide open) while trying to figure out whether to switch long
distance companies.

Stop smashing that window and you'll get 10% off Buffalo Wings at Applebee's

2004-08-18T09:53:00.000-04:00

The New York Times: Just Keep It Peaceful Protesters> New York Is Offering Discounts

My main response to this is the same response I've had to every news item over the last month- Thank God I'll be in Phoenix on business during the convention.

My other reaction is that surely they've got the plays mixed up here:

The Republicans get "Rent," the people who oppose them get "Tony n' Tina's Wedding."

Not that anyone is really going to be seeing plays during prime time, but isn't Rent, aside from having a score that recalls the worst of Pat Benatar, a very gay, anti-republican musical that even goes to the trouble of namechecking Newt Gingrich's Republican sister (I wonder if they still preserve that line for the proper 1994 authenticity, or if they've updated it to Mary Cheney). And while I haven't seen Tony and Tina's Wedding, doesn't it affirm the traditional definition of the institution that's the cornerstone of American society?

2004-08-16T10:17:00.000-04:00

Blurry photo of neighborhood clowns. Didn't realize stupid camera phone was on the lowest quality setting, which in terms of camera phones, means maybe 1 pixel.
Posted by Hello

2004-08-16T10:08:00.000-04:00

The question marks at the end of the last three ramblings were not intended to pose some invisible challenge to the reader. Instead, it turns out to be an unadvertised demoware feature of some palm based blog software that I am now turning off. (And editting the posts themselves for good measure).

2004-08-15T18:09:00.000-04:00

Last Sunday, as I walking down the street from my apartment to the corner drugstore, a young guy and an old woman approached me and put a Sprint cameraphone in my face.
The young man said,
"Have you seen this woman? She's my sister and she's missing."
The old woman started to say something in a broken mix of English and Greek, but the young man cut her off.
I answered with an honest "no", though I've got a typical Asperger's inability to remember faces outside of context. Once in college I introduced myself to a girl in my dorm as she sat in one of the of lounge chairs- we chatted it up for a few minutes- and then I returned, and because she had changed chairs, I went and introduced myself again.

"You live in that red building right," the man said, pointing to the two story brick building that I've been renting a one bedroom in for the last 4 years.
"Yes."
"We think that's where they're hiding her."
Now I know the apartment and I know the eccentricites of the family that owned it- in particular a long stream of close, contentious relationships with various neighborhood kids of indeterminate ethnicity who seemed to be perpetually on the stoop, hanging out at all hours. I don't exchange more than a few words with them, and both of us seem to like it that way- our main interaction is them protecting me from "Nana," the building's friendly, but perhaps too aggressively friendly pit bull that they are convinced I am deathly afraid of. I don't particularly like Nana (she's clumsy and ill-trained and strikes me as sort of the sort of dog that could do a lot of damage unintentionally- she has a habit of jumping up on people and landing on the wrong body parts), but I'm not afraid of her, and there's little more humiliating than being protected from canine attack by a twelve year old girl.
I'm sorry, I've lost the thread of the story- you must forgive my rambling. At any rate, my landlords were eccentric, but they didn't seem like kidnappers- and neither did the one other tenant in the building. Something about the statement bothered me, so I simply said I didn't know the woman and went on my way to the convenience store. When I came back, I found the old woman and the young guy staring at me and at the apartment from a stoop across the street.

I found the whole distressing, but a tad fishy. Why were they asking me? Were they trying to scam me in some way- I asked a few friends about the matter, and they remarked that I did the right thing by not getting involved (though it made me like one of Kitty Genoverse's neighbors)- it sounded vaguely similar to a scam to get into people's apartment buildings that I'd seen warnings about a year ago. Phil Nugent suggested that I show them how camera phones could also be used to call 911 if they felt she was in danger, something they implied but didn't say outright. I decided eventually to call the police myself, and after and a minute and thirty seconds of no response (cops don't respond quickly to non emergency calls on a Sunday Afternoon) I was connected with an officier who cut me off midway through my recounting of the events with an exact description of the young man and the old woman. They had been going around the neighborhood doing this for several weeks- and no they weren't part of any scam, but the girl had left her home voluntariliy, and didn't want to see them. They have apparently approached a number of buildings with similar accusations,but other than that are quite harmless, just distressed. I was glad that I stayed out of it- though it would be a great beginning for a cheap hitchockian thriller-there's a diviision between the heavily interconnected families who rent out the buildings in the neighborhood, and have deep roots here- (my landlord once bragged to one of the stoop girls that he could identify the location of any building in Astoria just by see the stoop- and proceeded to prove that on an array of camera phone pictures the girls produced.) and the various yuppies intruding and gentrifying the area.

Speaking of camera phones and intrigue- I finally have photographic proof of the clowns who show up occaisionally on my block. These are literal men in clown costumes, complete with big shoes, face paint, and brightly colored outfits, and they always look vaguely pissed off- like Bill Murray at the beginning of Quick Change. I don't know if they're professional party clowns, (in which case, why are their costumes so dirty?) or something else- but I at least can prove to people they exist. Photo will be posted by tonight.

2004-08-15T17:30:00.000-04:00

The Lee Bonctreau retrospectve is at MOMA Queens, apparently to be the last exhibit before the museum scoots back to Manhattan, is really something to upset your sense of depth perception- her sculptures are full of what look from a distance like tricks of light and shading until you move closer and realize that the canvas really is jutting towards you. as the pamphlet says "the viewer's perceptual orientation goes back and forth between the 'image' and the concreteness imposed by the materiality of the sculpture." Neither of one of our descriptions really capture the work- so if you're in the city, try and bring yourself to her work. And the odd combination of found objects(zippers, soot, canvas bags) into quasi organic and natural objects have a tight, menacing quality- they seem similar to images of monster lairs from various cheapie horror films, and they keep pulling you back, trying to make sense of them.

Am reading Francis Davis's Afterglow right now- which is mostly one long last interview with Pauline Kael. In a way, it's odd that it took me this long to buy the book- Kael is the probably the first major outside influence on my thinking and development. I discovered her stuff on my father's bookshelf when I was twelve and looking for books with sex scenes in them, and naturally titles like "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and "I Lost it at the Movies" appealed to me. I don't know what kept me reading-I doubt I understood a third of what she was saying, but it was her style-personal, chatty, and devoted to evoking the feelings of a movie rather than the more protean elements of plot or dialogue. She hated or didn't review most of what I was into at the time- I remember feeling horrified and liberated at once to hear her call Star Wars a lousy film when it was still a near sacred object among my age group. And I sought out the films she reccomended and tried to watch them and drag my family around them- and at that time in the late 80's things like Altman or Demme's work were almost unavailable for rental, so I had to picture them in my mind- and I'd try and squint at and make myself like Nashville or The Rules of the Games. But she seemed to have invented a new way to react to and write about film- a way of turning your own personalized reactions to a work into an imperial decree that I tried most to imitate- she made it seemed so easy. And so far away from the five paragraph essay structure I was having drilled into my head. I have somewhere on my computer some film reviews I wrote for the junior high school paper attempting to imitate her style- I'm afraid to look for them now. And I went around evangelizing her opinions, even about films that I hadn't seen, proclaiming to my social studies teacher that Steel Magnolias was "Chalk scratching against a blackboard for two hours,"(this is, roughly, Kael's complete review of the film) after she praised it- even though I hadn't seen it myself. I must have been insufferable to be around, and I can only conclude pity is the only thing that kept me from getting the snot beaten out of me on a regular basis.

Returning from the autobiographical recollections- Afterglow follows the form of the other post retirement Kael interviews- a smattering of personal anecodates, a few responses to her literary foes, recounting of her writing process and her battles with the New Yorker editors, some sketches of reviews of contemporary movies just enough to infuriate you that there's not more, and the repetition that no, she never watched any movie more than once. It's distressing to read her casually dismiss everything after the first season of the Sopranos, or that she speaks so highly of the West Wing (she does nail the show's saving grace- the cast), and it's encouraging to feel her respond to the sweetness of Galaxy Quest the way you did. (I just realized that my use of the imperial "you" in that sentence is one of my Kaelisms.) I got about 30 pages left to go and mainly I feel I never met her- I was at boarding school in the early 90's at what I didn't know at the time was her hometown of Great Barrington. There's a good possibility that I shushed her at the movie theater (I hate people who talk during movies, and to discover that she gossiped, snorted derisively, and laughed at the wrong moments during everything she saw was to me a bit like a devout Christian learning that Jesus picked his nose during the Sermon on the Mount.) I discovered that she lived close by in the publication of an anthology of her work in late 94, and while carrying it around in early 95, discovered that my much hated French teacher was a friend of Kael's, or at least claimed to be. She claimed a lot of things that were demonstratably false, not the least of which was a proficiency for teaching foreign languages. My teacher said she could set up a meeting between me and Kael, but I never pursued it too strongly- partly because being too into film was one of my issues that the school was trying to discourage in me, and trying to push a meeting might raise the ire of the administration. At any rate, she was in ill health at the time, and I was probably afraid that the meeting would end up something similar to Wes Anderson's when he arranged for her a personal screening of Rushmore.

Sparky song fragment of the day

2004-08-13T15:25:00.000-04:00

"And she will be loved.....". Every five minutes. Am considering
removing my ears for the rest of the workday.

2004-08-11T18:05:00.000-04:00

Tonight I swear....

Hello

2004-07-30T14:11:00.000-04:00

Sorry about the lack of updates of the last month or so. I'd say real events were intruding on my blogging time, but sadly enough of you know me well enough in real life to see through that.So, let's just attribute it to my much commented on laziness, plus a general drying up of Sparky related material. So, since you've all been patiently sitting here pondering the state of Ethan Hawke facial hair- an issue New Yorkers face on a daily basis, why not read the amazing new issue of The High Hat?

And on a personal note, I'd like to wish a hearty farewell to Gay Geneva:activist, coworker, blog troll, neighbor, soccer hooligan, and coworker, who is moving on to menace the Czech Republic.

Brief Nitpick

2004-07-12T12:44:00.001-04:00

Before Sunset blew me away emotionally enough- there's about fifteen minutes that's about as emotionally raw as I think a film can be that I haven't really composed a response as yet, but I just want to note that J. Hoberman in his positive review of the film refers to Hawke as :

The movie opens with Jesse[Ethan Hawke], no longer goateed

Not only is Ethan Hawke still goateed (it's the exact same kind of meticulously scruffy Fu Manchu that he had in the first film), but he's goateed in the still from the film accompanying the article- hard to see from the angle his face is at, but still definitely there.

2004-07-11T13:59:00.000-04:00

No excuses for the long absence of substantial posts here. It hasn't been from lack of material- over the past three weeks I've seen or reseen Orpheus, Blood of A Poet, Spiderman 2, Before Sunrise (preparation for Before Sunset), The Seventh Seal, Juliet of the Springs, Bound, a third of Andrei Rublev and Blow Up, and have felt no urge to really say anything about them. I read David Hadju's excellent biography of Billy Strayhorn, Lush Life and Steve Hicken's Air Guitar, and I've been procrastinating on a piece for the High Hat (yes, a new issue will come out someday) on Alice Flaherty's book "The Midnight Disease. " I also had a fourth of July trip to Chicago, My writing habits are sadly based on opportunity, or rather lack of opportunity to do anything else- right now I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Time Square, killing some time before seeing Before Sunset.

The blog itself is going thrugh a bit of an identity crisis, I can never decide if it will a personal log of day to day crisises, a shocking expose of our worsening workplace karaoke crisis, art and movie reviews, or a random collection of ephemera from the neighborhood etc.- for the 0 of you interested, I have made no progress on the mystery of Bob Stern. At any rate, more soon.

â?¬

Just Had To Get the eHarmony Crap Off the Top of the Page

2004-07-07T15:03:00.000-04:00

Phil Nugent has a really extraordinary post here about Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11. I don't have a right to an opinion yet since I haven't seen the movie yet (if you look carefully, the quote from me on the film is merely about pre-publicity), though I intend to this weekend.

Posting may be somewhat sparse in the meantime. I'm not feeling terribly inspired to write about most of what I've read/seen/listened to over the past few weeks, or my trip to Chicago. I'm vaguely playing around in my head with theme of Asperger's obsessions, partly because it's a minor bit of a play I'm plotting out, but that's not really at the posting stage as yet.

So very, very alone

2004-06-24T15:44:00.000-04:00

Veg emotionally blackmailed me into filling out my own eHarmony profile ("If I had to go through with it, so do you.". I find to my surprise that it can find no matches for me with anyone on the planet, though I am told to wait 48 hours.

Out of eHarmony

2004-06-23T15:25:00.000-04:00

Read my friend Veg's adventures with the Creed of dating services

Slow week

2004-06-23T09:26:00.000-04:00

Lot of other stuff going on this week, so updates will be sparse at best.

Pathetic

2004-06-18T10:03:00.000-04:00

Only one request for a Google e-mail address? Don't people know this is the free e-mail event at that.

Work Fact of the Day

2004-06-18T09:58:00.000-04:00

In the event of a fire drill, a muffled, heavily accented announcement will be made over the loudspeakers and people will mill about the entranceway until leaving. The receptionist will be ordered to stay in the building.

In the event of a real fire, I donate this blog to Veg.

Facts Sparky wants you to know

2004-06-17T10:54:00.000-04:00

1. He was at last night's Madonna concert, and it was GREAT: "She did a good job. I give her a lot of credit," he says, noting it for her next quarterly performance review.
2. Madonna said Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 made her cry more than anything in her life.
3. (Also applies to everyone within three cubicles) This is a Material World, and he is a Material Girl (this is for some reason, sung in a deep, slow voice at times- picture the Tom Waits version of the song.)

Now that they're worthless

2004-06-17T09:52:00.000-04:00

Since gmail is no longer the only gigabyte e-mail game in town, and they're rapidly extending their beta so that I've ran out of interested friends to give free trials to, I'm now opening it up to my legion of readers. The first two people who comment on this post with a legitimate e-mail address get a Google gmail account.

Update 1:05 PM:Scott Von Doviak claims address number one. One Remaining.....

The sort of thing that gives people with Asperger's a bad name

2004-06-14T10:46:00.000-04:00

Astoria Mystery

2004-06-12T11:26:00.000-04:00

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.

IT horror story of the day

2004-06-11T15:30:00.000-04:00

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.

Shpatzirin

2004-06-08T21:58:00.000-04:00

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

2004-06-08T14:11:00.000-04:00

No new posts today.

Also Blogger appears to be acting up again.

Something's up

2004-06-07T17:35:00.000-04:00

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

2004-06-07T17:27:00.000-04:00

BTO-"Takin' Care of Business"

Boss Post

2004-06-07T14:03:00.000-04:00

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

2004-06-07T12:55:00.000-04:00

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

2004-06-07T12:34:00.000-04:00

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 Café 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.

Longer Post Soon

2004-06-04T10:39:00.000-04:00

I know I haven't posted since Tuesday, and soon I will be replying to my varied and angry commenters, but right now Sparky is walking up and down the hall ways singing "I'll be your naughty girl" and his performance is driving all other thoughts out of my head. Anybody know something that can cause instant laryngitis?

One More Time

2004-06-01T16:34:00.000-04:00

Just wanted to post this again for old time's sake.

John Kerry intern scandal - Alexandra Polier's account

2004-06-01T13:24:00.000-04:00

Read all about it: A damning portrait of American (and British journalism.) It's fairly pathetic that Mickey Kaus, without acknowledging his own part in spreading rumors, responds to her piece, by saying:

"We shook the tree," a reporter for The Hill tells Polier. "A bunch of names fell out, and yours had the most flesh to it." A bunch of names? Hmmm. Had Polier heard such names? Doe she think the hopes for a good Kerry sex scandal are completely unfounded? She's remarkably reticent about Kerry's behavior with others. ...

No link for him, because I was about to write a post to chiding Phil for his Kaus obsession, when there are far worthier targets.

My First Google Search Terms

2004-06-01T10:48:00.000-04:00

It's for "bohemian hall" and "beer garden" On the whole, I can think of worse ways to start

Brief housekeeping note

2004-06-01T10:46:00.001-04:00

I like e-mailing some of these entries, but it seems to screw up the
formatting and not allow links to be placed. The previous entry will be
edited with links, and possibly a photo later.

Vague and personal stuff- then Robert Moses

2004-06-01T10:05:00.000-04:00

Like Phil over at his blog, I've been reviewing the past this weekend-
although I spent much of psychic energy on finally closing some doors- I
think one friendship may be over for good, and I'm sad about it, but
it's really been over for a while, and I really can handle only so many
crazy people in my life at any given time.

I never did get around to blogging about a week ago Sunday, and now the
moments passed, so let me give the executive summary. I spent Sunday the
23rd walking with the Curiousity Guild from the top of Broadway in
Manhattan to the South Seaport. The ostensible reason was to explore
the life of Robert Moses, and the effect he's had on the city. The
problem is (a) his effect on the city isn't particularly tied to
Broadway- except for his part in building Lincoln Center, which as I
understand it involved him forcing the candy store owner from West Side
Story, you know the one who says to the gangs "You kids today! You make
the world lousy!" out to pontificate elsewhere, along with every other
resident of those slums and (b) the person who was supposed to lead the
tour, who had actually finished "The Power Broker", could not attend, so
we were left with people who'd read about a third of the book (that
includes me), and people who'd watched the recent Rick Burns
documentary. At any rate, no one can sustain that kind of a narrative
for 230 blocks and six hours- so we mostly broke off in groups and chit
chattted. I met a lot of cool and interesting people among the 23 who
started the walk, and the 12 who limped into South Seaport, and I hope
to see them again some time.

News on the painting

2004-05-30T22:33:00.000-04:00

The painter of the piece I won at raffle has a name- Dave Geraghty.

Inadvertantly posted on another blog.

2004-05-30T19:24:00.000-04:00

I'm having an interesting but somewhat anxious and formless weekend, not like last weekend's bustle of activity. All actual plans have been cancelled or lazied out of or whatever you want. The writing that has gotten done has been in vague notes, and I'm afraid if I actually tried to develop them, they'd break like old leaves. So I'm going to leave you, one of my 5 or 6 readers with a quote from Dave Hickey's Air Guitar, which I'm reading now at the Brick Cafe and will write more about once I'm finished, but right now I just owe a big favor to the people who reccomended it to me:

Jazz presumes that it would nice if the four of us—simpatico dudes that we are—while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically this never quite works out. At best we can only be free one or two at a time—while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have and sometimes it works—but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectalicm beyond our social concerns.
Rock-and-roll on the other hand, presumes that the four of us—as damaged and anti-social as we are—might possibly get it to-fucking-gether and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple and we're too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whether we want to or not. Just because we're breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigee of delicate distinctions.

I don't agree with this, particularly about jazz, the joy of listening to Ornette Coleman's free jazz, which Hickey lumps with synthesized drumming is the joy of how four musicians can feel so tightly linked and in sync about such formless music that they give it form. But it's a great read.

Disturbing Things My Boss Does: One in a Series

2004-05-30T18:06:00.000-04:00

When his son(Sparky) was in college, they got into a fight over the phone,
and his son hung up. His father sent a man over to his college in upstate
New York to knock on his son's window in the middle of the night. When
Sparky woke up and saw the man at the window,the man said to him "Your
father says hello." I'd say this was a mafia intimidation tactic, but even
as dark as Tony Soprano's been portrayed this season, he'd never use
something like that to deal with his children, no matter how out of control
they got. I could see him killing them under certain circumstances, but not
exercising such a meaningless show of intimidation. But such things are my
boss's lifeblood.

Maintenance

2004-05-30T17:53:00.000-04:00

At some point I'm going to move this whole blog to another location, one
that involves hopefully less typing. Should be the next week or so, and the
old site will automatically redirect, at least for a while.

I have no other truth to tell today other than that I'm avoiding writing
plays, avoiding the gym, avoiding the film "Dogville," which I know I have
to see at some point, but it'll probably be after my next dental exam,
which it feels spiritually close to. And I'm foolishly avoding sun screeen,
which since I've been in outdoor cafes doing something since 2 is foolish.

For any actual Astoria readers, there is an amazing estate sale of books,
books on religion,all religions, sociology, economics, self-help, history,
biography, fiction, and other stuff at 30-09 42nd St. It's a fairly amazing
selection, at least it was yesterday. So get off your computers, and go
there. (Just don't get dragged into an argument as to the merits of cds vs.
records, but you probably knew that.)

Chronology of Last Weekend: Part One

2004-05-29T17:10:00.000-04:00

Friday Afternoon: Long Instant Message argument with girl I am seeing, now to be named Gloria, after the character in the Sopranos. Gloria reaches the conclusion that I am ruining her life and her heart forever and shares with this me at length.

Immediately work, on a whim, I head to a place I see on the Nonsense New York Mailing List, The Art-4-All Party & Auction on the Lower East Side, a benefit for children's art auctions. I half-heartedly paint a mural and envy others who can draw a whale and make it seem both spontaneous and gorgeously contained. Then I go get very quickly drunk at the bar upstairs. To my surprise, I win the raffle auction ad get first choice of the paintings, and chose a gorgeous abstract piece, seen here:

It looks to me like a cross between an x-ray of teeth and a post-apocaylptic western landscape. I am congratualted by the others, who joke that they may mug me on the way out. Artist is not present, and his name is unreadable from the back. I give my business card to the organizer, who promises to send me the artist's info very soon. To this date, I have not received it.
8:30 PM: Make it to the pharmacy just in time to pick up my prescription. Receive a call from Gloria, answer curtly. Gloria wonders why I'm mad at her now, and I opine that it seems fairly fucking obvious to me, and hang up. Get my prescription.

10:00 PM: Head to bed early, in view of long commute and project on Saturday.

9:45 AM After an hour long subway ride, I arrive at Prospect Park (inexplicably the general weekend subway confusion that has screwed over dozens of my weekend plans actually works to my advantage and I take the F direct from my house to the park). There I join my New York Cares team for the annual clean up of the park, which turns out to involves dozens of other groups. I end up with a grizzled park volunteer, who knows Prospect up and down, a Americorps member who runs an after school program (to my surprise, I learn that Bush killed Americorps but then revived it- anyone with more information on the current status of the project, drop me a line or leave a comment), and several others in cleaning muck that has been blocking the drains for well over two years, according to the grizzled volunteer. We find a dead rat, a very peacefully posed dead frog, and about 300 pounds of some of the foulest smelling muck you've ever encountered, and shovel them into wheelbarrows, and dump them behind some trees in the park, where we are assured they will naturally decompose. A good deal of muck ends up on my jeans and the odor pervades me. After the event, I perform a sociological experiment on the f train on teh way home, and find out that pretty much everyone will set next to me as long the train is crowded enough.

Late Afternoon: I decide to attend the Billionaire's for Bush ball, less for any real sympathy or amusement with the satirical cause (it strikes me as the ultimate in preaching to the converted and a useless bit of street theater up there with giant puppets,) but more as a party to go to alone. Alone seems to be the theme of the weekend, I want to ditch all my normal associations and just involve myself with others. I ignore most messages from Gloria, and have a brief phone fight with her when I say that I'm not spending the night with her. I go and buy a tuxedo because they are on sale for 60 bucks and I figure I might have some other use for one- also I buy a hat at an Army Navy Store that is the closest I can find to a top hat. I get a briefcase that I bought earlier in the afternoon from a garage sale (I actually went to two separate garage sales in two different boroughs during my trip home, but this entry has to wrap up sometime.) By 10 PM, I've finished everything and dressed up and ready to go.

10 PM: Leave for Billionaire's Bally, which is exactly as I expected it to be. If you break out into spontaneous peals of laughter over Thomas Nash cartoons, it would be a real hoot for you. There is a very cool Eastern European band upstairs, and I spend most of the night dancing there. At some point, I sit down and surf the web on my Treo, only to spot someone else doing the same. He says "I guess this really is the Billionaire's Ball."

I had planned to go to another party afterwords, a moustache theme party: anyone with a fake moustache gets in free (the party organizers go to great lengths to explain how it is not a gay party, and neither are they.) Since I already have the moustache as part of my goatee, I decide to bring a razor along with me, and offer to shave it off for admission- my hair grows at a wildman rate, and I would have the full goatee back in a week. The razor that I packed in the briefcase is the newly released Gillette Mach Power, which uses an aaa battery to massage the face as you shave and to thus force hairs up or something. Unfortunately, the razor goes on when the briefcase is pressed against. In addition, I find that have closed the briefcase, I can't open it again- I never got the combination from the garage sale. I briefly ponder what would happen if a random party goer came across an unattended, vibrating briefcase at a political fund raiser. So I dance with the briefcase, which proves slightly easier than dancing with the cane I brought as a prop. I don't drink any liquor, since I realize that my new medication scheme is making me an incredibly cheap drunk.

Sunday 2 AM: I decide to leave the party, and am tired, but somehow still walk from Chelsea to Union Square in order to catch a different subway than the one I came in on. Along the way, I stop to sit down and get a ginger ale at a bar. It turns out to be a very karaoke bar that is hosting a really bitchy bachelorette party, and group karaoke that is being mangled to the point that I can't tell what the song is. There is a long discussion next to me on the double entendre inherent in "I'm down on my knees, I wanna take you there" in Madonna's Like a Prayer, which I thought barely qualified as a single entendre. In the middle of this, I develop a spontaneous nosebleed all over the bar. No reason has been found on that yet, but I apply a lot of ice, stop the bleeding, clean up and go home.

At home, I realize I left my bright red bow tie at the karaoke bar.

Alright, I'll write about Sunday a little later- right now I'm going to watch more of State of Play. h

2004-05-25T19:33:00.000-04:00

I had an incredibly busy weekend that I've been taunting and annoying
people with for the last four days, and I do really want to write it down,
since most of my weekends involve sitting in squalor waiting for Alias to
start, but I fear I spent too long on the charms of Mary Lynn Raskub (she's
also weirdly appealing in Punch Drunk Love), so it will have to wait until
later this evening.

Woman of the Year

2004-05-25T19:28:00.000-04:00

After a season or so of events that have pretty much cancelled each other
out, at 9 PM, we're in for the season finale of 24. I haven't had much use
for the show except for the last 5 or 6 episodes, where it's returned to
the virus on the loose plot that it appeared to be starting at the
beginning of the season, before Mexico, before the baby, before elaborate
triple crosses, a somewhat half-hearted attempt to get us intersted in the
fate of a health care bill, three separate attempts to blackmail the
president, which he somehow foiled despite being the dumbest commander in
chief on either side of the fictional divide. All these plots just fizzled
out, or were revealed to be tricks or something, and at the end of the
season, the only thing that's definitively happened is that the show's two
Love to Hate female characters, Penny Johnson Jerald as the President's
ex-wife and Sarah Clarke as the scheming ex-agent Nina Myers were finally
brought to their maker. Their betrayals were such a joy in the first
season-particularly Jerald, whose whiny, self-justifying Lady MacBeth
character was such a revelation after years of watching her play the
supportive wife or secretary, that suddenly you realized she'd been (kinda)
wasted playing straight man to Garry Shandling and Rip Torn. And Nina's
coat turning in the first season, while completely nonsensical set up up
clearly that the show was not going to spare anyone in the end- her blandly
competent look shifted so subtly into ruthlessness that you could kinda
piece it together into something plausible. But two years later (or five,
in the show's timeline), it was clear that the writers had no idea what to
do but trot them out for ever more cacklingly evil appearances, to the
point that Sherry was nagging men to their death and Nina was taking a room
of trained agents with a cut throat and a handcuffed arm.

What this season did introduce, in its sole redeeming feature, was Mary
Lynn Raskub as Chloe, the CTU expert in something or another technical.
Whiny, socially inappropriate, and generally resentful, she was the only
person among the glamorously disshevelled spies at the Counter Terrorism
Unit who seemed like she worked in a real office. When something bad
happened to a loved one of an agent, as happens every 55 minutes or so on
the show (never have I been more glad that my childhood suspicions that my
parents were spies turned out to be false), she'd always be the one to
offer too blunt condolences like "I'm sorry your husband got shot in the
neck" or "Are you talking to your sister that's dying of the virus?" and
then whine about being misappreciated. I fear in an hour she'll be revealed
to be a secret Serbian terrorist bringing down CTU from within or die a
noble death, drawing tears from the people who've been snapping at her all
day, but she's definitely my sole remaining interest in another season.

Things I learned secondhand tonight

2004-05-24T20:40:00.000-04:00

Air America really is failing, letting go of its top heavy staff, and
desperate to scrounge up new financing.
David Mamet really does talk that way.

For all my fellow Astoria visitors from the NYC Bloggers Map

2004-05-20T16:19:00.000-04:00

Do you know what the deal with the little white haired man who stands on the corner of 42nd St. and 31st Ave waving the American flag every weekday morning around 8 Am? Is it a conspiracy to make my life feel more like late period Twin Peaks or what? I'll see if I can get a photo, or possibly talk to him- but most of the time I run into him, I'm late for work- and in the morning, I'm likely to blurt out something like "So what's your deal?"

As you may have noticed

2004-05-20T16:12:00.000-04:00

I've had nothing in particular to say for the past few days, and I've
been covering that up with getting some of the technical stuff set up.
I'm having stress (and joy!) in two different areas of my life right now
that seems to be dominating other parts of my life, but it's nothing I
feel like talking about here. I did have one of the most mature
relationship conversations of my life with the girl I'm currently
seeing, but she's demonstrated a profound disinterest in my blog, aside
from keeping her name out of it. On the off chance it turns to something
more- my desire not to get married and have kids in the next 16 months
make that unlikely- I'll figure out a pseudonym.

Finally

2004-05-18T17:32:00.000-04:00

Comments and the sitemeter are back up

2004-05-18T17:22:00.000-04:00

Let's see if the site counter is back.

Playwriting Group

2004-05-17T22:08:00.000-04:00

Attended today for the first time in months, sadly still with nothing to present. Also, someone presented a hilarious piece that has the potential to be shaped into a minor comic masterpiece about self-editing. Much talk about the greatness or lack thereof of Stoppard's Jumpers- I had some deal to buy tickets come in the mail to me, but it's gone now

Our assignment for next class:

Write about the death bed experiences of a famous person

Really have to put the page counter etc. up here. Plus a decent comment system.

The Dark Nugent Returns

2004-05-16T19:53:00.000-04:00

Phil Nugent is an internet/Real Life friend who was really the guy who cajoled me to actually start writing again. It came as a nasty shock when he deleted all the posts in his great blog, The Phil File or Here Be Monsters, but he's got a great new one up, that everyone should read, but I'll excerpt the bit about how Hunter Thompson is really the guiding spirit of our culture, which involves too much of the blogosphere.

Hunter is in the mouth of Bill O'Reilly when he bravely invites people onto his TV show so that he can boldly scream at them to shut the hell up; he's in the camera of Michael Moore when Moore invites himself into Charlton Heston's home so that he badger his ailing, muddle-headed old host until he says something garbled that can be taken as a racist slur by the people in the audience waiting for something to boo, then whip out a picture of a dead little girl Heston never met and demand to know if he doesn't feel somehow responsible for her death. (When he was healthy and relatively clear-headed, Heston was both an enthusiastic gun owner and a dedicated participant in the Civil Rights Movement, which is exactly the kind of combination that the participants in today's opinion culture can't make sense of; it would demand that they imagine a person who chooses his postions on issues according to what feels right to him, not which ones are in his chosen half of the "conservative"/ "liberal" score card.) The myth--the big lie--behind the Hunter archetype is the idea that it's a brave, political act to call someone a werewolf or a worthless criminal ward heeler or a rosy-tailed babboon. It is, instead, the most effective way of convincing anyone who already disagrees with you that they have the consolation of knowing that their opponent is a jerk.

2004-05-16T19:44:00.000-04:00

I edited that last post, so if it didn't make sense last time your read it, check again. For those interested in seeing me blog (or write otherwise) live, it's generally done at the Starbucks on Steinway and 31st Avenue. I don't like Starbucks for all the cliche reasons, but there's something anonymous about it that's conducive to writing. Other places in Astoria are a little too sceney, or bar like and I just get less done. There's a coffee shop on Broadway that's a sort of exception but that's another matter.

I don't have a laptop right now, so I write on my Treo 600, with an IR keyboard. It's a very nice, full-sized responsive keyboard that allows me to type very fast, but it's not at all an editing platform, what with the tiny screen and no printing. The Freaks and Geeks essay that the High Hat will publish when their next issue comes out was written almost entirely on that.

2004-05-16T17:05:00.000-04:00

I'm in a thoroughly bad mood now, and if I put it all into a blog, I'd end up having to go out on the street with a bag over my head, because my millions of readers would fear that laser beams of hate would shoot out of my eyes. I'm comforting myself with the knowledge that I'm generally in a sour mood after a night of serious drinking, and last night, with its beautiful beginning of summer heat, was my first night of the year at the Bohemian Hall Beer Garden. Anyway, after a morning of slow moving and the belated realization that I'd fiddled around until about 3 PM when I went out in search of lunch, I wrote a long sour post about everything wrong in the world and my place in it, and then deleted it.

Anyway, one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place was to help with my writer's block. I've been reading two books on the subject lately, the first Rita Emmit's bestselling "Procrastinator's Handbook", the second Alice Flaherty's reassuringly clinical "The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain."

The former lost me just a few pages in when Emmit talked about a client of hers who wanted to put up motivational posters, but just couldn't find the time, only to find that he could do it in just a lunch break, and that he found, when he did it, "everyone loved the beauty and spirit of the prints," which makes me wonder if Emmit's ever been near an actual office in her life, or just depends on the descriptions of the management types who can afford her seminars. When I see big photos of eagles with the words underneat about how rare true leaders are, the only thing I feel motivated to do is update my resume.

Snarkiness aside, the book has some good practical advice, most of which I haven't followed, a good quarter of which I've forgotten, but without it I wouldn't have remembered to get a new set of keys, without which I would have been a true pickle when my crappy fake letter jacket developed a pocket leak. And I have used stuff from the book to work better at the office.

Flaherty's book isn't a help guide, it's an exploration of the mind's desire to write, and it's gorgeously written and clear headed. It starts out with her description of how she developed overwhelming, life wrecking hypergraphia (opposite of writer's block, compulsion to write at all time) after post partum depression. Somehow she's able to clinicize writing and its desire without reducing its mystery or beauty- when she talks about the similarities between a creative brainstorm and an epileptic seizure, she makes the both of them seem more miraculous, not less so. I read the book and I want to write just to explore the neurological states that writing brings up, good and bad.

I'm only a third of the way through the book, and I've just gotten now to the part on writer's block. She describes it as generally being localized, and writers pouring out letters while being stuck at page one of their novels, but in my experience when a really paralyzing block strikes, it strikes everywhere. I feel like at various points through the last few years it's been close to swimming through tapioca to compose an e-mail to a friend, to post on a discussion forum, to even put together a simple set of technical instructions. Lately, it's been better, for reasons I won't get into here, and I can definitely write more than I used to- I walked into this Starbucks fully intending to work on one of my two plays for a workshop tomorrow, but instead, I've written two of these blog entries, and the words just seem to flow out. And I really should get to those other things before the Sopranos comes on.

I'll leave with an excerpt from Joseph Conrad about his block (Flaherty quotes this from his letters):

I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted by the necessity of style. And that story I can't write weaves itself into all I see, into all I speak, into all I think, into the lines of every book I try to read...I feel my brain. I am distinctly conscious of the ocntents of my head. My story is there in a fluid — in an evading shape. I can't get hold of it. It is all there — to bursting, yet I can't get hold of it any more than you can grasp a handful of water...

Ehh....

2004-05-16T12:20:00.000-04:00

The blogger based comments system seems to require all commenters to
be members of Blogspot or "anonymous". So, I'm going back to the old
comment system once I remember what it was.

2004-05-15T07:52:00.000-04:00

Tom Tommorrow says most of what needs to be said about the Nick Berg matter, and the meme circulating right wing blogs that there's a conspiracy to avoid it.

I don't why specifically people are looking so much for pictures of his death, or why it shakes me less than it does the murder of Danny Pearl, but I hope to write more later. I have to get to Brooklyn now.

2004-05-14T15:22:00.000-04:00

I am reminded of another reason I put away my blog. My life is fairly boring, even to me, who lives it, and the stuff that is not boring (my relationship, bizarre things that happen on the job) isn't repeatable. I'll make one exception today- a coworker tried to send me a transcript of some inane conversation he'd heard between the office manager and one of the salespeople. Unfortunately he accidentally sent it to the office manager, who shares my first name. The transcript doesn't reflect poorly on the office manager, it's really about the high decibel idiocy of the other guy, but the nickname chosen for him, taken from the character list of HBO's The Wire does. He appears to be taking it well, but I don't think he's seen the show yet, and I'm sure he's checking HBO's sadly complete character guides now.

Speaking of office politics, last night I saw Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa.
In its broad strokes, it's in the genre of "Yuppie Redeemed by Life
Changing Event" that plagued us through the 90s (in fact IMDB lists
"Life as a House" as a remake). Kanji, a successful bureaucrat, played
with mournful eyes by Takashi Shimura learns that he's dying of stomach
cancer and has left than six months to live and he realizes he hasn't
been living at all and that his son hates him. He goes on a wild night
on the town, flirts with a coworker played by Miki Odagiri who calls him
"the mummy" and eventually rededicates his life to forcing the stale
bureaucracy of Tokyo circa 1952 to build a park. Although you could come
out of there with a message of stereotypical uplift, that's not where
the film's interest lies. What we see of the effort to get the park
built is in flashback during his wake, from the drunken perspective of
the various functionaries he cajoled into building it, and it quickly
descends into squabling. He never makes up with his son or even tells
him he's dying, a decision the son calls "cruel" at the funeral. More
than any other movie about missed opportunities, Ikiru focuses on what's
beyond repair, on the lingering sadness, on how Kanji feels "darkness
everywhere, and nothing for me to hold onto, no matter how hard I try."
Even the scenes of him going on the town with a novelist have a bleak
feel- and there's a disorientation in Odagiri's eyes as he wanders busy
strip clubs and dancehalls in Tokyo that may have influenced Lost in
Translation.

The office politics in the film is done in broad, comical strokes (there's a montage at the beginning of a bureacratic buck being passed that's as completely predictable as it is brilliantly shot.) Kurosawa paints his society from the outside, but that's how he paints Kanji too, giving our first view of him through narration and gossip that insults him before letting us in, and then again returning to our view of him from the outside, as we can now see others through their reaction to him.

(Don't really have a conclusion here, just wanted to get a few thoughts up while the film was fresh in my mind.)

By the way, if comments are closed off on a post, it's not because of
any deliberate action- it's because there's a bug with the new blogger
feature that allows you to e-mail your posts into blog that seems to not
activate the comments for that post. I'll go back and correct them when
I get a chance.

2004-05-12T19:24:00.000-04:00

But, in a world where I can count twenty well chewed pens within my immediate eyesight, it's important to remember, that some children are so poor that "a pen is like a scholarship to these children."

Best Street Food in Astoria

2004-05-11T18:54:00.000-04:00

A new champion. Broadway and 31st Avenue, right across the street from the little Japanese market.

2004-05-11T13:57:00.000-04:00

Blog roll will be returning soon, for those feeling slighted, or for
those who trust my opinion of which blogs are worthwhile. It's odd,
given the prominencedisturbingly Friendster-esque Profiles feature of blogger, that they don't seem to
have an easy way to implement a simple set of links. I might be missing
it somewhere.

2004-05-11T13:14:00.000-04:00

One time only, soon to be deleted crazy face photo of me.
Posted by Hello

2004-05-11T12:55:00.000-04:00

A few reasons for the long blogging hiatus:

I got tired of bitching about my job. After a while, every piece of bitching seemed to draw the response from my inner critic- "So why don't you just leave then?" (To which my inner economist drew up a picture of the job market in New York City) In addition, by the necessity of keeping job bitching pseudnonymous, I always felt like I was limiting the blog's audience to people who already knew about my discontent and had heard them a million times. I'm keeping it pseudononymous, though I can't imagine anyone navigating their way here doesn't know my real name, but I'm not going to be real serious about protecting my secret identity. That means that the job bitchings will be limited to my other blog, which is less of a blog per se than a series of random mutterings under my breath that I make on the R train in between spitting on eldery passengers.
I really found the name kinda pretentious and long winded. I mean, it's a pain for you to type in, you who have been so loyally visiting my updateless site for the last few months. It was just a name, based on an old Yiddish saying that I got out of a book of quotes when I was twelve that stuck with me for a while, but after a few months, it seemed to embody the worst kind of blogger boosterism from the political blogs I read- that they were the lone truth tellers fighting against a biased and indifferent media. Therefore, I pledge to you that any truth told here will be (a) boring, (b) trivial, and (c) easily found elsewhere. The running? Well running's just good exercise.
I kinda had two other blog projects festering in my mind, one of them, a non anonymous blog, can be found in it's stillborn state in a fairly obvious place, and the other, a group blog, will be coming soon.
General procrastination and laziness, which, technically speaking, this should be the perfect outlet for, but in general, I procrastinate specifically on writing projects. My first piece for the The High Hat should be up soon, and that has in all seriousness been a serious blow against my writer's block and procrastination. I figure keeping this up will be good writing practice.

2004-05-11T09:26:00.000-04:00

I'm
(a) testing a new template
(b)seeing if the built in blogger comments work now.

2004-05-10T22:32:00.000-04:00

Alright, I think I'm going to stick with this blog as my primary semi-private rambling place at least for now.

2004-03-03T09:05:00.000-05:00

ModBlog UpdateI'll have a new site or some news within the week.

2003-12-20T14:35:00.000-05:00

The Kids are alrightEncouraging fact of the day: smallchildren still sing the exact same "Batman Smells" version of "jingle bells" that we used to sing as kids. At the time I thought it was the dirtiest thing in the world, but I just assumed today's jaded kids would have moved to something racier.

2003-12-14T10:08:00.000-05:00

<br /><br />Test Post Only

2003-12-09T12:31:00.000-05:00

Test Post Ignore this post.

2003-11-10T13:11:00.000-05:00

2003-07-17T10:34:00.000-04:00

Comments appear to be working again.

2003-07-16T21:39:00.000-04:00

Some columnist on Salon wrote a while ago that "Unfinished projects are like rocks in our pockets," and that seems about right- I still find myself, half asleep on the subway, playing around with characters and plot that - like all but the barest pretense of my ambition to write fiction- I abandoned years ago: A weird post modern but vaguely autobiographical tale, of filming a Superman movie at a Jewish day camp for 8 year olds, and then re-enacting our ancestors escape from Germany, complete with the counsellours playing border guards and giving us lie detector tests (unfortunately, I overloaded it with too much postmodern hoohah.) A character piece about a guy I went to boarding school with who struggled to be the straightest of the straight arrows and is now wandering homeless in Central Park (could never get a handle on the character, possibly because I really disliked him at school. Did have an amusing bit about him trying to pawn a small Rodin sculpture. ) Neither have been touched since, charitably, speaking, summer 1999, but I can't get rid of them, and I may have to write them just for purging purposes. Of course part of the reason I can't get rid of them is that all my notes for the stories are still on my Palm Pilot.

2003-07-02T11:14:00.000-04:00

Here's a first. At line in Circuit City last night, the man behind me was actually buying a DVD of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo- a movie that I've never seen, but I'm so familiar with the title from jokes (basically taking the title to another movie, and adding 2: Electric Boogaloo to the title. Yes, I'm easily amused. Try it today with Gosford Park.)

Much amusing office politcs coming soon....

2003-06-30T12:46:00.000-04:00

Hey New York: Meet the creepily smooth faced Dr. Zizmor and his wife- you know, from the subway ads. The article does not explain why in the most recent ad, she has a huge ad covering the upper third of her face- I can't be the only who thinks because he uses her forehead as a sketch pad.