The Odds Against Tomorrow

Tribute In Light

2008-09-14T23:38:00.001-04:00

Tribute In Light
Originally uploaded by Vidiot

This might be the last year they do the tribute in light. Of course, something should be done so that it continues - of course, something should be built there so that we might always remember. From the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center, it just looks like an (extraordinarily large) construction site.
My friend Sam took this photo; I was across the East River, and what I could see was ghostly, pale, and not worthy of any photograph I'm capable of taking. I could see no one taking time to look.
Maybe they lights have become commonplace.

Old Joy

2008-07-13T14:58:00.005-04:00

"Sorrow is nothing but worn out joy."
- Kurt, Old Joy

The film Old Joy concerns itself with two old friends, who take a trip into the Oregonian wilderness. Bearded, bald Kurt, at whose prodding the journey is undertaken, is a lost-soul-type; cleaner-cut Mark a somewhat worried father-to-be. Mark's pregnant wife is glimpsed briefly at the very start of the film, but her entire role is over before the opening credits are finished.

At 78 minutes, the film is neither a short nor a feature; a lot of things remain unsaid and have to be gleaned from gesture. The director, Kelly Reichardt, seems to have absorbed Tarkovsky's obsession with nature, without resorting to the frankly bloated running time of many of that man's films. If Cuarón's Y tu mamá también bashes you over the head with the idea that its road trip is in every way "ultimate" and that its characters are traveling together as an act of closure, then Old Joy is merely content to suggest that Mark and Kurt will never see one another again.

The film's most conventional scene takes place at a campfire. Kurt tells Mark of auditing, then giving up on, a physics class - because they "wouldn't accept his theories." Mark has nothing to say to this, which causes Kurt to flatly state that he is worried things between them aren't ever going to be the same.

While Kurt apologizes for showing his emotions (always a no-no amongst heterosexual American men) it is telling that later the film, Kurt touches Mark in a way which simultaneously suggests violence and religious transformation.

Somehow ponderous and yet also succinct, Old Joy says more about the inability of young men to successfully navigate the passage to true adulthood than perhaps any other film I have yet seen.

best dialogue scene in any film, ever

2008-07-01T00:09:00.003-04:00

Manchurian Candidate, 1962. "Rosie" is Janet Leigh; "Marco," Frank Sinatra. Set-up for the scene is that Sinatra, sitting in the dining car of a train traveling from Washington to New York, has just spent a good two minutes trying, and failing, to light a cigarette. He stands up abruptly, knocking over a table, and leaves the train car. Leigh's been watching him and follows him out into the vestibule.

Rosie: Maryland's a beautiful state.
Marco: (Looking away) This is Delaware.
Rosie: I know. I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid the track on this stretch. But nonetheless, Maryland is a beautiful state. So is Ohio, for that matter. (She lights her own cigarette.)
Marco: I guess so. Columbus is a tremendous football town. You in the railroad business?
Rosie: Not anymore. However, if you will permit me to point out, when you ask that question you really should say, 'Are you in the railroad line?' Where's your home?
Marco: I'm in the Army. I'm a major. I've been in the Army most of my life. We move a good deal. I was born in New Hampshire.
Rosie: I went to a girls' camp once on Lake Francis.
Marco: That's pretty far north.
Rosie: Yeah.
Marco: What's your name?
Rosie: Eugenie.
Marco: (He finally looks at her) Pardon?
Rosie: No kidding, I really mean it. Crazy French pronunciation and all.
Marco: (He looks away) It's pretty.
Rosie: Well, thank you.
Marco: I guess your friends call you Jenny.
Rosie: Not yet they haven't, for which I am deeply grateful. But you may call me Jenny.
Marco: What do your friends call you?
Rosie: Rosie.
Marco: (He looks at her) Why?
Rosie: My full name is Eugenie Rose. (He looks away) Of the two names, I've always favored Rosie because it smells of brown soap and beer. Eugenie is somehow more fragile.
Marco: Still, when I asked you what your name was, you said it was Eugenie.
Rosie: It's quite possible I was feeling more or less fragile at that instant.
Marco: I could never figure out what that phrase meant: more or less. (He looks at her) You Arabic?
Rosie: No.
Marco: (He reaches to shake her hand) My name is Ben, really Bennett. Named after Arnold Bennett.
Rosie: The writer?
Marco: No, a lieutenant colonel who was my father's commanding officer at the time.
Rosie: What's your last name?
Marco: Marco.
Rosie: Major Marco. Are you Arabic?
Marco: No, no.
Rosie: Let me put it another way. Are you married?
Marco: No. You?
Rosie: No.
Marco: What's your last name?
Rosie: Chaney. I'm a production assistant for a man named Justin, who had two hits last season. I live on 54th Street, a few doors from the modern museum of art, of which I'm a tea-privileges member, no cream. I live at 53 West 54th Street, Apartment 3B. Can you remember that?
Marco: Yes.
Rosie: ELdorado 5-9970. Can you remember that?
Marco: Yes.
Rosie: Are you stationed in New York? Or is stationed the right word?
Marco: I'm not exactly stationed in New York. I was stationed in Washington, but I got sick, and now I'm on leave, and I'm going to spend it in New York.
Rosie: ELdorado 5-9970.

Please feel free to disagree with my assessment.

Lonely Island Restaurant

2008-05-26T17:42:00.006-04:00

I was riding a Red Hook-bound B61 bus, sitting under the air-conditioning vent in an unsuccessful attempt to freeze a hangover out of my brainpan. Near the intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Henry Street, a pretty girl got on the bus. I looked up to watch her walking down the aisle, and then furtively glanced out to the street when she took her seat. I saw the facade of a restaurant. For a second its cursive letters spelled out "Lonely Island Restaurant," which, having seen the place before, I knew to be untrue.

The island I inhabit is long, but it is not lonely. Hallucinations be damned.

A friend visited and asked if I was still writing. I said not so much, but that it didn't mean she couldn't call me that anymore. Schmook said "If you're a doula, he's a writer. He gets a pass." Thanks, Schmook. I'm going to try to make good on that pass.

Netting

2008-05-05T12:45:00.002-04:00

Netting
Originally uploaded by Vidiot

Brooklyn Bridge. Taken by Sam Meyer

Guest Posting

2008-04-25T22:09:00.002-04:00

Next week I will be guest-posting on mpthreesome, my friend Old Man Steve's music blog, as "the jazz guy." Whatever "jazz" is anyway. It's all just music to me. Such a statement can only serve as a preview of my tastes.

Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Reggie Workman, Village Vanguard, 1961

Thanks to flickr user klbndc for the photo.

Cross-posted to Craigslist Missed Connections

2008-04-24T09:42:00.002-04:00

This is just to let you know I'm sorry.

As we were getting on the subway this morning, I directly behind you, I stepped on your sandal in such a way that it shot off your foot and into the crevasse between the subway car and the platform.

I looked at you, acknowledged what had happened, and then I got on the train, leaving you on the platform, standing on one foot.

In some alternate universe, I'm a compassionate guy, and not a jackass. In one of these universes, I jumped onto the track, retrieved the shoe from a whole family of rats, jumped back onto the platform, disinfected the shoe, got down on one knee, and gingerly placed it back on your foot.

In another, I gave you a piggyback ride back to your apartment, or perhaps a Payless.

In our universe, I was a real first-class shit.

If I'm ever out with friends, and a stranger throws a drink in my face, I'll have another reason why.

Cross-posted here.

MANSCOUT COOKIES

2008-04-23T22:00:00.006-04:00

So earlier today I was eating lunch with my friend Kaitlin in City Hall Park. We were just sitting on a bench, shooting the shit, eating panini (a side note: they're just grilled cheese sandwiches; stop besmirching the fine cuisine of Italy, New York delis). Then we are accosted by a rabid squirrel. It looked absolutely nothing like this:

It also wasn't really rabid. It just looked like it had been in New York too long - its tail fashioned by subway exhaust into a mohawk, its eyes bulgy from too many espressos. Some day a rain is going to come that will wash all the acorns off the streets . . . but I digress. The squirrel was to be but our first guest. There was also the crazy lady following the squirrel - but her dementia grants no amusement.
The story I'm really trying to tell - what I'm really trying to lay the ground for, here, in a way, a roundabout way, because this is a total shaggy dog - is the story of the Man Scout Cookie Man.
He is a most insistent fellow. And if you're lucky, you'll meet him some day. He'll be carrying a boom mic in his right hand (for shoving into your face) and wearing wraparound shades. In his left hand, he'll hold a ziploc bag of crumbled do-si-do Girl Scout® Cookies. They'll look like they've been left out in the sun too long. The bag will appear tampered-with, in the least. He'll ask you, as he asked us,
"Would you like to buy one of my cookies?"
"No thanks," you will sensibly say, in stereo.
"Why not?"
"Because they look gross."
"I haven't had my shots."
"Aww, come on," he will implore you. "They're delicious. Just try one."
"No way. They're not Thin Mints."
"Yeah, I would totally prostitute myself for Thin Mints."
"Okay," he'll relent, and then, retorting, "how much would you prostitute yourself for these cookies?"
"Dude, you miss my point. I would not prostitute myself for your busted-ass cookies. I would not even take them free-of-charge. Crazy-ass Man Scout Cookie Man. You're giving Girl Scouts a bad name."
"Alright, but just one final thing: if you were to run the Man Scouts, what would their motto be?"
The Man Scout Cookie Man just loves lateral thinking. You would do best to sink to his nonsense.
"I would say their motto would be 'first, do no harm,' much like the Hippocratic Oath."
At that, he shall probably leave. He has recorded your voices for some future posterity, you can be sure. Your celebrity in South Korea is assured. Your lunch is only somewhat ruined.

The following video in no way represents my encounter with the Man Scout Cookie Man. It's just another way of looking at a blackbird. But here you go. You've been forewarned.

A Sign "Web two-point-oh" May Have come of age

2008-03-26T20:46:00.003-04:00

Believe it or not, my dad finally discovered youtube.

And, after he begged me, I found for him this ([NSFW]):

Yes, that's Joan Severance. Nothing says "sexy" like "hot diner grill." Also: blind husband! I watched pixelated soft-core porn on a Mac flatscreen with my father. I suppose I should be ashamed, or proud.

"Tell Me a Bedtime Story"

2008-01-26T02:55:00.000-05:00

Herbie Hancock interviewed by mediawhore Kurt Andersen on "Fresh Air for airheads," aka 'Studio 360.' I promise you, it's better than the Tommy Boy soundbite at the beginning would have you believe. The best part, pretty near the end, is hearing Herbie relate how he composed the melody for his song 'Maiden Voyage' after waking up on a plane, then proceeded to immediately forget it entirely, only to remember it during the recording session for a completely different song. If anyone can drag up a recording of Terry Gross interviewing Hancock, or the Marian McPartland Piano Jazz interview, I'd be much obliged.

BONUS: totally silly 'Wait Wait Don't Tell Me' segment featuring Hancock.

Keith Jarrett clips

2008-01-20T17:36:00.000-05:00

It's a bitter cold Sunday afternoon and if you're reading this the day I posted it, you're probably immersed in (American) football or trying steadfastly to avoid those who are.

So anyway, what the heck, here's a few clips of pianist Keith Jarrett, one of my favorite musicians, in a variety of contexts:

Spiral Dance, Hannover DE, 1976

Here he is in 1976, with his band of mathematical Scandanavians - Jan Garbarek on sax, Jon Christensen on drums, and Palle Danielsson on bass. On record this tune is ~5 minutes. At fifteen (the first five minutes of the clip is just Jarrett feelin' the spirit), this approaches trance. Well, trance, but played by people who actually understand musical theory.

Solo, 1984 Tokyo - Encore

When he stands up, you know it's serious. Some have said Jarrett's solo concerts are an attempt to reintegrate improvisation and classical music. From this layman's standpoint frankly what comes to mind is Jarrett's ability to create themes out of absolutely nothing, turn them inside out, and then play them through to palpable climaxes.

1970 w/ Paul Motian, Charlie Haden

Beautiful melodies amidst total anarchy. Love how Haden blows on his hands near the end of the clip. Charlie Haden - bass, Paul Motian - drums.

Prematurely Air-Conditioned Supermarket

2007-12-07T10:36:00.000-05:00

Philip Glass' opera "Einstein on the Beach" is over thirty years old. You might remember part of it (a very short segment of "Knee Play 1") from a 2000 Superbowl Pepsi Commercial.

Last night, I attended the presentation of an abridged version of the musical portion of "Einstein," performed by Glass and his ensemble at Carnegie Hall.

It's very difficult to think of "emotional directness" when confronted with thirty musicians performing a score notated to within an inch of its life. When recorded in a studio, Glass' music tends to lack what you might call a human element. As such, it was a thrill to hear the somewhat-panicked breaths of the sixteen chorus members, to watch the soloists gulp down bottled water, to see Glass himself (at one of the three keyboards) mouthing "one two three one two three one two three," and tapping his feet to keep time. Occassionally throughout the performance I would turn my head to watch the other spectators. They, as I, were agog.

Of particular note was the violin soloist, Tim Fain and the readings of Melvin Van Peebles (Sweet Sweetback himself) whose life of accomplishments, according to his bio, began " at age ten selling second-hand clothes to winos" and later the "Boy Scouts, Astronomy, Youth for Christ, The Strategic Air Command, The Merchant Marine, The Artillery, The Post Office, Cable Cars, Het Nederlands Comedie, ACLU, Cinematique Française, Harkness Ballet, Boston Marathons, Pinochle, the Block, Blues, Dues, Senegalese Police, and Mexican immigration authorities." What a career! What a show!

The Part They Throw Away

2007-12-02T14:56:00.000-05:00

Dumpster Monitors

Snow Shoes

The day was clear and cold, and as soon as I'd finished taking these pictures, it started to snow again. It collected on my hat and jacket, but not the ground.

"The more headlong the progress of technological development, the greater the volume of obsolete detritus. And the detritus isn't simply material. It's angry religion, resurgent countercultural ideologies, the newly unemployed, the eternally unemployable. Obsolescence is our legacy."
"[W]e Americans are lucky enough to live in the most wonderful world of junk. [ . . . ] Use and abandonment are the aquifer through which consumer objects percolate, shedding the taint of mass production and emerging as historied individuals."

-Jonathan Franzen, "Scavenging," fr. How to Be Alone.

How to Be Alone, Part II

2007-11-13T23:56:00.001-05:00

Plastic Palm II
Originally uploaded by Orangette_Coleman

Coney Island, Saturday November 7, 2007.

Went to the end of the line and took some pictures, though not enough. The light was very good, but I don't really know what I'm doing with a camera.

"I'm not in the business."

2007-11-08T17:56:00.000-05:00

"I am the business."

Some thoughts on the 'Final Cut' of Blade Runner

A couple of years back, right before Kill Bill, Volume 1 was released, The New Yorker did a profile of Quentin Tarantino ("The Movie Lover," which doesn't seem to be fully available online) in which he said the kind of movies he wanted most to make were "hang-out movies," the kind you would revisit for their characters. I've always revisited Blade Runner for the scenery. The characters are ciphers. Items on which clothing is hung, around which ambiance is placed. But we don't go looking to Ridley Scott for real human beings.

Stripped of his narration, Deckard now spends most of his time staring at fixed points to the left or right of the camera as neon lights pass over his visage. He's no longer the hero - just a functionary. He looks like he just swallowed something awful. Maybe Harrison Ford always looks like this.
I still can't understand the 'infinite zoom' scene in Deckard's apartment. What are we meant to take from the fact that Zhora was in the photograph?
Where the heck does Batty find that dove?
Sean Young, I love you, but you're crazy all the same.

The Ladies Who Kvetch (over Vietnamese Food)

2007-11-01T18:38:00.000-04:00

There's just something about a bowl of pho. Tony Bourdain was right.

Unfortunately your something might just be 'near-orgasmic culinary experience' while someone else's something might just be 'a reason to kvetch about husband number three's proclivities for women without legs.'

And by 'without legs' she didn't mean he sought the company of spindly ladies. I mean like this woman's third husband (who was the love of her life) dug on some amputees. And apparently had affairs with them. Which she felt comfortable sharing with her friend. And anyone in earshot. Which was pretty much everybody in the restaurant.

"I know why he loves them - they can't get away." Said her friend. Which was sad, but probably true.

The pho was good, by the way. Some of the shrimp were overcooked, but that's the beauty of pho. Who knows what story the next bite will tell?

This is the first of what I hope will be a periodic feature in The Odds Against Tomorrow. Imagine a mashup between Overheard in New York and, oh, I dunno, Grub Street or Midtown Lunch or what-have-you. On the chopping block this week was Bao Noodles on 391 2nd Avenue. Which was nice, but ultimately no Mott Pho Bang.

Carla Bley Big Band, Live 1984 Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival

2007-09-22T12:48:00.000-04:00

Pink Panther

Excellent inside-outside take on the classique Mancini movie theme. Viva la Peter Sellers!

Song Sung Low

Check out the excellent smoking skills of Mr. Lewis--I'd probably swallow my butt if I had to keep the beat like that.

Blunt Object

Light or Dark

Carla Bley: Claviers
Theo Saunders: Claviers
Tony Dagradi: Sax Tenor
Steve Slagle: Sax Alto
Earl Mc Intyre: Trombone/Tuba
Ray Anderson: Trombone
John Clarke: Cor
Steve Swallow: Electric Bass
Victor Lewis: Drums
July 1984, Juan les Pins

Why should I care?

If you've made it this far into the post, I both commend you and feel I should offer some reason as to why I've gone to the length of putting every single available clip from the 1984 concert of a fairly obscure jazz musician who to the casual spectator would merely be the third-runner-up in a Daryl Hannah-in-Blade-Runner competition. While perhaps I am a sucker for Miss Bley's hairstyle, realistically, I am a bigger sucker for big-band avant-garde improvised music. If you like what you heard here (and it is my sincerest hope that you do) I strongly recommend that you check out Frank Zappa's Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo (or, frankly, any one of the many, many bootleg and quasi-bootleg recordings made during the early 1970s by Zappa and his band), Sam Rivers' Crystals, and/or Henry Threadgill's Too Much Sugar for a Dime. For further (and frankly, more properly recorded) exploration of the multiple-keyboards-in-jazz thing that seems to be going on in the Bley concert, I strongly recommend In a Silent Way. RIP Joe Zawinul.

Bonus!

Carla Bley - Lugano, Switzerland 1985

A recording of a small-group, pleasantly all-over-the-map live session featuring Bley on the organ, for those able to tolerate .wma files and with 47 minutes to kill.

A Year in NYC.

2007-09-09T15:55:00.000-04:00

I moved to Brooklyn exactly a year ago.

I realized this at a friend's birthday party and decided, that in a totally surreptitious way, a way that I would not announce, this party was also my "year in NYC" party.

So, a year. And many more, I hope.

jazzbos

2007-08-06T22:47:00.000-04:00

John Lewis/Richard Davis/Hubert Laws/Mundell Lowe/Dane Svend Asmussen/Roy Burns

"Point of View," composed by Lewis, fr. 1975 Monterey Jazz Festival.

Gerry Mulligan/Art Farmer

From "Jazz on a Summer's Day," 1958.

Don Cherry/Rashied Ali/James Blood Ulmer

Live, 1978.

Stolen Moments

2007-07-29T17:28:00.000-04:00

Detail

About a month ago, I was walking on Metropolitan between Leonard and Manhattan and I saw this gigantic poster in a trash bin. It's wonderfully ugly. Not in a John Waters-kitschy kind of way; it's simply hideous. I've given it a home and thus far I am its only champion. It consists of a rock band band, their instruments and faces etched in black sharpie, shooting forth from the neck of a beheaded figure. If I had to describe it an a Hollywood pitch-meeting kind of way, I'd say it was Mati Klarwein-meets-Pedro Bell-meets-a-blank-spot-on-my-wall-that-needed-covering.

Graf Truck

Walking around with the new-to-me camera in the soon-to-be-no-longer-mine neighborhood. Is grafitti a crime? Discuss.

Live at the Silo of the Yard: "The Secretary," Matana Roberts, Guillermo E. Brown

2007-07-21T21:15:00.000-04:00

Situated across the street from a limousine garage and adjacent to the Gowanus Canal in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, is a performance space known as "The Yard." It's literally a gravelly enclosure, with a couple of trees making a brave showing of it against the concrete skyline, and some Christmas lights strung up as if to indicate "yes, yes, this is the place for the festivities." The one outstanding feature is "The Silo," a two-story concrete tube, that, yes, used to be a silo - very novel nomenlaturists, these people - all of which is hidden behind a wrought-iron gate.

It's the kind of place that, one can be certain, someone has plans to condo-fy. Yuppiefication could happen in a matter of months, it could happen a matter of years. Or it never happen, if the place is actually a brownfield (which I would not doubt, being so close to the so-recently-filthy Canal).

On Friday, I saw a show at "The Silo" at "The Yard." Or should that be "The Silo at the Yard?" The space was the size of a classroom, and there were at most ten other people there, three of whom worked there.

Well. It was part of a concert series called "Lone Stars" whose aim, according to the press release, was to place musicians commonly seen as collaborators or band members in a solo context.

First up was baritone saxophonist "Moist" Paula Henderson, who billed herself as and entitled her solo CD "The Secretary," and also put together the concert series. With allmusic as an accomplice, it appears that she has gigged for a couple of Brooklyn-based rock groups. Henderson played funk riffs over techno loops, a couple of which were prefaced with the advisory (warning?) "this is a true story." The best piece came at the beginning, when the loop consisted of sax riff that The Secretary played over in counterpoint. All the rest of the loops were cliched high-BPM drum tracks.

Henderson was followed by Matana Roberts, a Chicago-based alto saxophonist, who performed unaccompanied by electronic adornment. She dedicated her set to the late soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, who tutored her towards the end of his life. She said "he sent me a postcard and he was in Boston at the time playing a lot of Monk and Ellington so maybe that's what you'll hear tonight, depending on the energy of the room" and then breathed deeply and just started wailing.

There's this great interview with the film director David Cronenberg, about the film Naked Lunch, for which the saxophonist Ornette Coleman contributed to the score by playing over prepared music peformed by the London Symphony Orchestra. Croneberg recounts that during a break in the recording session "a woman, a violinist came up to him. She said, 'Are you--you're not playing with music.' And he said, 'No, I'm just kinda, you know, making it up.' And she said, "Do you get jobs?' So we assumed that she didn't know who he was."

I digress from trying to objectively review Roberts' set only because I feel the violinist's comment not only perfectly describes the relationship between a concert musician and an improviser, but between an audience and an improviser. Why should people care that a musician can "make shit up?"

Well, Roberts made shit up. But good. She also stopped to sneeze in the middle of a note and everyone in the room said "bless you" at the same time.

Closing out the evening was Guillermo E. Brown, a jazz drummer who has performed extensively with the saxophonist David S. Ware and the pianist Matthew Shipp.

Brown took the stage, his drum machine and effects pedals slung over his neck with frilly guitar straps. With that getup, I was expecting a keytar freakout, but what I got was slam poetry backed by funk beats. Brown used the pads of his drum machine like miniature congas, crooned like a soul vocalist, and had a song whose chorus was "buy my album." Plus his soundcheck included a single tone of less than a second in duration that has since demonstrably limited the decibel range of my hearing.

The thrill of new music, with an audience that is more concerned with the performers than with one another and themselves. It's enough to make me . . . stay in and blog about it. Woooooooooooooo.

laughterhouse

2007-07-17T23:16:00.000-04:00

It's come to my attention that if you put an f in front, unfair becomes much more interesting.

I.e. "these are funfair demands," or even . . . 'funreasonable;' or maybe . . . 'funrecognizable.'

This is my new coping strategy!
All "un-" prefixed words are now 100% more fun!

Take the 's' from slaughterhouse - and you are faced with a domicile of mirth, not an abattoir of . . . BLOOD.

Some might say that adding a 'g' to 'unfair' makes for a winning proposition, but I think it makes for a lot of balding men spending their Sundays in that warehouse out by the airport, haggling one another for the best deal on armor-piercing bullets. Which, if we were to continue our odyssey of subtraction and substitution, become amor-piercing bullets - the standard materiel of any modern-day Cupid.

Which Are Good? Which Are Bad?

2007-05-24T23:34:00.000-04:00

Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report

2007-05-20T17:34:00.000-04:00

For those of you that like your warning signs for the coming of American fascism served in terse, tender slugs of AP-style copy, look no further than right inside the dragon's mouth.

The Department of Homeland Security's Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report "is collected each week day as a summary of open-source published information concerning significant critical infrastructure issues."

The last ten issues are available online. Each offers a veritable catalog of hazardous material leaks, viral outbreaks, and commercial shipping disaster inquiries. The goal, whether stated or not, seems to be to offer new terrors to shape the American mindscape.

Take for example this tidbit, from the most recent issue:

Utilities say stolen copper wiring have led to disruptions. A spike in copper thefts has two of Detroit's largest utilities offering rewards of up to $2,500 for tips leading to the arrests of anyone selling or buying stolen copper[. . .] [There are] several cases in which thieves used power saws to cut down electric poles in less−populated areas of the city to get to the copper wiring. Copper prices hit an all−time high at about $4 a pound last May. Last week, the price was $3.70 per pound.

The alarm sounded by the Infrastructure Report, again and again, is that the dissolution of industry (copper, telecommunications) is a greater threat than the dissolution of society. Clearly a person has been failed by his or her educational system if they cannot understand the threat inherent in cutting down live electric wires. Such crimes and catastrophic events - truck thefts, evacuations caused by the mixing of volatile chemicals or prank phone calls, erroneous reports of swine death spreading faster than the virus alleged to cause the death - are more informative of a culture of ignorance than one of fear.

"Por orden del departamento de la salud . . .

2007-05-05T18:53:00.000-04:00

. . . no se devuelve la ropa interior."

That's right.

By order of the New York City Department of Health, you are not allowed to return undergarments once purchased.

Can't find the code or statute here, but I can tell you I saw a sign advising customers of this in a store where I bought some socks today. Just in case you felt like you weren't up to date on my life or the New York City Health Code.

Or maybe, just maybe, if you wanted to, you could turn the absurdity of having to be reminded that you can't return underwear into a bit. Just know that you have my blessing, (you know who you are).

Things Seen this Weekend

2007-04-29T15:13:00.000-04:00

I have eyes, so I see things; ears, so I hear things. Things seen (and one thing heard) this weekend, in order of seeing:

An incredibly fat one-legged pigeon, picking at cigarette butts, on a train platform at the Jamaica LIRR station;

A woman who refused to enter a Metro-North train at the Mt. Vernon East station because she would have had to cross a steel bridge suspended over train tracks to do so;

A person picking flowers (maybe they'll find the cure for cancer, who knows) in the grassy knoll of an eastbound highway offramp on the Hutchinson River Parkway;

and a grown woman, wearing a sandwich bag as a glove, picking the crap out of the ass of an adult bulldog, soothing the pup's frazzled nerves by saying, "oh don't you worry, it's only your tush."

Pictures of things seen taken: 0. I don't own a camera and I think if I did the pigeon is the only thing that could have been snapped.

What did you see?

Judgment!

2007-04-20T23:12:00.000-04:00

Andrew Hill, 1931-2007

On March 29, 2007, I was one of hundreds in attendance for what sadly became the jazz pianist Andrew Hill's final public performance, as part of the "Concerts at One" series at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan. Hill died today, at age 75, from complications of lung cancer. I don't mean to reveal to you just exactly how much doesn't get written, but of course I intended to put a review up; of course, other things (what were they?) got going, and it never appeared.

As time has passed and my initial impressions dulled to memory, I can only give the boilerplate. Per my program, Hill was accompanied by John Herbert on bass and Eric McPherson on drums. They performed "Before I . . .," billed as "a liturgical work created from original themes and compositions in the form of written and improvised music."

I recall, basically, an hour's worth of performance, the first part involving Hill playing out the composed part, then playing it with the band, then stating variations on themes, which was played solo; a second part that essentially consisted of a drum solo by McPherson, comped by Herbert; and a third in which the band played out the originally stated themes to a conclusion.

The allotted hour having passed, the event's minders tapped their watches, and Hill stood up from his bench. The piano faced away from the audience, so he had to turn to acknowledge that anyone was even there. As he did so, he was startled. I doubt he expected a full house, and, it is apparent to me now, his illness got the better of him. McPherson rushed out from behind his drumkit, taking the arm of a man who was suddenly very old and frail, and led Hill off the stage.

Frankly, I'd really never heard Hill's music before the concert. But I think captivating hundreds of people in a church on a rainy Thursdsay afternoon with nothing but your hands, eighty-eight keys, two willing accompanists, and whatever comes to your mind, is a heck of a way to go out.

Hill's albums include Black Fire, Point of Departure, Judgment!, Andrew!!! and last year's Time Lines.

Video of the event is available here.

Flight

2007-04-01T16:42:00.000-04:00

As an update from last week, if anyone was keeping score: letters written to writers, zero.

However, also: responses to my idea of sensibly applying Niven's first law for writers, zero.

This week I'm going to dwell further on authors, the exploitation of 9/11, and generally how they relate to art - kind of a "greatest hits" of whatever it is I want this blog to be. As 'ol Pynchy sez, "Let the reader decide, let the reader beware."

In my review of Idiocracy (just scroll down, one self-link is enough, I think) I referenced an essay by American Novelist (I think he'd want the N capitalized) Don DeLillo, "In ruins of the future." Published in December 2001, it was one of many "holy-fucking-shit-what-do-we-do-now"-type essays written by several otherwise calm personages in reaction to the events of 'that day.'

Flash forward six years and a couple of intriguing projects for DeLillo, and, it appears, he's decided to do a 9/11 novel, to be entitled Falling Man, with a tentative release date of either May or June of this year. Farbeit for me to guess at the quality of the work; the galleys have already made their way to a Fordham University English professor and published Woolf scholar, who has registered a laudatory opinion. So from now until then, I'll have to take her word on the contents.

The cover, however, has been made available.

It is very easy for me to imagine that vertical line descending straight down through the clouds and thence through the original falling man, the one depicted in Richard Drew's September 11, 2001 photograph, "The Falling Man."

So, questions: are America's book cover designers leading our children down a moral sewer? Or are they just getting better at using the power of suggestion? I leave you with an image that I saw today for the first time, that I believe belongs to the same idiom as Drew's: Tom Sandberg's Untitled, 2004.

Will the plane hover forever, or will it descend?

Sensible Application of Niven's Laws

2007-03-24T12:04:00.000-04:00

The science-fiction author Larry Niven has a series of precepts which he uses to guide his life (and, one would imagine, his work).

These are called "Niven's laws" by the fans (this being science-fiction, they are legion) and "how the Universe works" by Niven himself. This might be due to an ego the size of Known Space, but even that would be smaller than Harlan Ellison's.

Note the first "law for writers."

1. Writers who write for other writers should write letters.

While I'd be interested to hear your opinions on the veracity of Mr. Niven's statement, I take it as a challenge to follow the letter of the law if not the spirit, and write letters to novelists, presumably right after I've finished their books. As I wouldn't have come across these laws if I hadn't been reading Niven, (Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers) he'll probably be the first to get the treatment. Though truthfully I feel more moved to send epistles to Claire Messud (The Emperor's Children) or Cormac McCarthy (The Road). I definitely need to do this, if only ask McCarthy if he had to fight to publish The Road as a two-hundred page short story. Seriously, no chapter stops? Goodbye, sleep.

I will keep you all posted, though I think that (like this blog) this will be a purely rhetorical exercise if it ever comes to fruition.

Scantronix: A Scantastic Adventure in True Scanovision

2007-03-11T18:54:00.000-04:00

A couple months back, I lucked into a scanner. Yay me!

"If your moustache likes Piña Coladas, and gettin' caught in the rain . . . " The above photo and the next were found at The Thing, a Greenpoint, Brooklyn junkshop. In the back room and basement, it hides many shelves of moldy, disorganized secondhand records, that are (allegedly) the biggest collection in any NYC store (g'head, ask me about my vinyl finds, but ye shall f'rever be marked as a hipster).

A rearview (or "upskirt," somewhat perversely) of Coney Island's Parachute Jump.

The bubble mailer is God's gift to office downtime. POP POP POP!

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend"

2007-02-13T20:56:00.000-05:00

Why do journalists chase stories? Are some things better left unsaid?

Today, mere weeks after Ceasar Borja, Jr. met with the President of the United States to give voice to the health crisis of World Trade Center salvage workers, the New York Times published a story criticizing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and the editors of the New York 'Daily News,' amongst others, for grossly exaggerating the efforts of Mr. Borja's father, Cesar Borja.

Mr. Borja, a police officer who developed an ultimately fatal respiratory illness three years after working on site at the wreckage of the towers, did not, as Clinton wrote to the President, work 16-hour shifts; nor is it likely that he rushed to the site of the World Trade Center as the towers fell on September 11, as the 'Daily News' stated. He began working in December of 2001 as a traffic and security officer at the towers, and worked a total of 17 days on site. His decision to do this work , according to his widow, was based "at least in part" on a desire to increase earnings in preparation for retirement. These were not the acts of a hero - merely those of a man. The Associated Press printed a humble retraction: in a January 31, 207 article recounting Borja, Jr.'s meeting with the President, they had "overstated the officer's role at the World Trade Center site [and] erroneously called Borja a Sept. 11 police officer."

What are we to make of it when the most prominent story detailing the health crisis of 9/11 workers seems to be constructed more of myth than reality? More of our need for everyone even tangentially involved in the crisis of that day to have acted for purely heroic reasons, rather than for opportunistic, or even selfish ones? There are some things we don't want to know, but it is the job of the press to make sure that we know them, or could have known them if only we'd paid attention.

Consider this, from the Times' article: "Mrs. Borja and her son said that The New York Times was the first newspaper to ask them for documents showing Officer Borja’s actual duties at ground zero."

Even six years on, it remains basically distasteful to imagine the police, firemen, and first responders, who rushed into that which most would run away from, as anything less than selfless demi-gods. I doubt we'll see a remake of Three Kings in which a ragtag group of unlikely bedfellows plots to make off with 9/11 salvage contract booty.

For better or worse, The Times has brought Officer Borja 'back to earth.' But only time will tell if the article has not also tarnished the larger story, of relief for and recognition of the health problems suffered by those who, for whatever reason, worked at the World Trade Center site following the 9/11 attacks.

'Daily News' response to NYT article

The title of this piece is a quote from John Ford's 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. All quotes, unless otherwise indicated, are from the New York Times article "Weeks After a Death, Twists in Some 9/11 Details," written by Sewell Chan and Al Baker, with additional reporting by Alain Delaquérière, Sandra Jamison and Carolyn Wilder, published on February 13, 2007.

Counterintuitive Advertising(?)

2007-02-11T17:51:00.000-05:00

In the course of my afternoon perambulation, I espied an advertisement behind the plastic shield of a telephone kiosk wall. Now this in and of itself is nothing; if a tickling of the optic nerve is what one desires, and broadsides specifically, at that - well then, the world is your oyster.

But more to the point: my location. Pretty near the center of an ostensibly Puerto Rican shopping district. The advertisement was for Finnair. Its goal: to present New York's JFK as their new hub airport for North American business travel to Russia and Eastern Europe.

Now, I have some idea that somewhere in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, there is an ad for JetBlue's economy service to San Juan, PR, sitting there just as unloved as I imagine Finnair's ad to be.

The lesson: either someone does not know their market, or my neighborhood is about to see a 200% increase in smoked fish and Cyrillic lettering in the doorways.

"In the ruins of the future"

2007-02-04T14:17:00.000-05:00

In early 2005, Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill, Office Space) handed a film given the working title of Uhh-merica to the executives at Twentieth Century Fox. The film, retitled Idiocracy, was test screened later that year. Some reshoots were done, and then it was quietly buried.

So far as I know, the film was and has never been promoted by Fox in any form; there has been a DVD released. I heartily recommend you do all you can to see it; while far from perfect, and in the unlikely form of a gross-out comedy, it presents an evocation of a possible future that ranks with Blade Runner. I don't mean to say that these films share a similar Weltanschauung, but rather that in both, set design and art direction aids and abets rather than compromises the story.

The plot of Idiocracy is this: an utterly average man and an utterly average woman of our own day are placed in suspended animation, to be thawed a year later; they are test subjects for a government program meant to put elites in deep-freeze. The program is forgotten by those who initiated it, and the man (Luke Wilson) and woman (Maya Rudolph) sleep five hundred years. All the while, as explained in an opening montage, the stupid have bred excessively while the intelligent have failed to breed. As such, the world to which they awaken is but a supersized, broken-down version of our own.

Fuddrucker's has become Buttfucker's. Gatorade (retitled 'Brawndo') has replaced drinking (and crop) water. Costco (we see only one outlet) is the size of a small state. Medical care is doled out like fast food. The infrastructure of the past keeps the present together, but only barely so. Buildings are literally held together with duct tape.

When presented with a digitally rendered urban landscape such as this, I could not help but think of David Fincher's 1999 film Fight Club.

The film gets you to cheer for the destruction of the present, for the sake of the future. The future is enticing "because," as Don DeLillo states in the 2001 essay which provides the title for this post, "there is no memory there."

While Fight Club's acts of violence are meant to free society, what happens when the reasons for those actions are never articulated to the world which must deal with their consequences? We are not shown these results - but Tyler Durden's ecotopia, wherein the survivors of the global financial cataclysm will be "stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center[. . .]climb[ing] the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower [and] laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway" seems less likely to me than Judge's nation of morons.

What are your thoughts?

Alex Colville, 'Pacific,' 1967

2007-01-31T20:57:00.000-05:00

Canadian artist Alex Colville's Pacific (1967, acrylic on asbestos board, 53.3 x 53.3 cm). The first thing you think: geometry. The second: violence. Is it really part of the man's life?
How could it be, with that kind of pants crease? The guy must never sit down. Let alone the dry-cleaning bills for getting out bloodstains.
This painting is a series of basic shapes, tending towards complexity. Hexagonal stone tiles; rectangular door/window frame; the pistol forms a triangle with the inlaid ruler on the coffee table, though seemingly laid there carelessly. Despite these forms, there is disorder; nothing is at center. The wave will eventually crash, and after it, another. Nothing is contained entirely by the frame, save the gun.
See also: Heat, To Live and Die in LA, and all those other movies that romanticize living a large life in the margins of moral gray areas like Southern California.

"looking back to see if they are looking back at me"

2007-01-21T22:38:00.000-05:00

In the essay "Las Meninas," the French philosopher Michel Foucault describes in infinitesimal detail the painting of the same name (1656, Diego Velázquez), as a means of introducing a larger work about systems and hierarchies in - well - everything (the damn book it's from is called The Order of Things, fer chrissakes).
Far be it for me to offer anything new about Foucault's actual interpretation of the painting, but let's just say that he contends it offers a representational framework in which the artist, his patrons, his subjects, and his audience (i.e., us) are arrayed in a strict series of power relationships.
These relationships are conveyed almost entirely by lines of sight. It is the job of the painter, who has chosen to place himself in his own painting, to observe, indeed to scrutinize his subject, just as it is the job of the ladies-in-waiting, governesses, and various hangers-on to care for, to watch over the Infanta, to whom everyone in the painting, save the King and Queen, is subject?
Who is observing whom? Who is being observed? It's a veritable forest o' glances - and we (the viewers) are most certainly included. When we observe most portraits, we imagine that the subject's gaze (if there is such a gaze to be observed) was directed at the painter. As in Las Meninas the subject has her back turned to the painter, and the painter's observations seem to extend beyond his intended subject, and the "proscenium arch" of the world represented inside the painting. It's just a hop, a skip, and a jump to all those terrible eighties movies where cartoonists are sucked into the world represented in their drawings (c.f. Cool World, 1992, the music video for a-ha's "Take on Me," 1985).
Or, hopefully in a more positive and rational light, we can use Foucault's revelations about observation and power to talk about the guilt that comes when you realize you're looking at someone, a total stranger, really eyefucking them, and they look back at you and do the same, and you are no longer strangers, but there is a third party, and he's just so damn oblivious to the whole thing, he's like looking at some shop window-display, and you pass the girl by, and you will never see her again, but for a split second there was totally a connection, man. All I'm saying is, ever since I read the essay, the painting is all I can think of when I feel an air of unease in a room full of people sizing one another up, making that first and lasting impression. It defines how I observe that which is unfamiliar to me, and in turn, how I wish myself to be observed.

I don't know where I'm going here. I've wanted to write about Meninas for the longest time, I doubt I'll ever do it justice. I leave you with this: if you ever watch Eraserhead, and then immediately afterwards you find yourself cleaning up your roommate's dirty dishes, and you notice a crust of melted white cheese on the bowl and the dinnerware, you will undoubtedly gag repeatedly and it will be a valiant fucking effort for you to avoid throwing up.

Critical Assembly

2007-01-15T19:00:00.000-05:00

A hot tip: when people start staring at you on the subway, it's probably because you're reading a technical book about making atomic bombs.

Dig the symbolism on that cover. Oppie with his trademark porkpie, his lips pursed in scrutiny (perhaps disapproval?) of The Bomb (Fat Man?), which is being hoisted by a hook that recalls nothing less than the Soviet sickle, buttressed by a cross. Note the prominence of the proboscis.
The book is actually copyrighted by the US Department of Energy, so you know it's good.

Tickle Me Elmo On Fire

2007-01-07T13:11:00.001-05:00


In today's deeply disturbing and fast-paced world, we often lose sight of the big picture. That's why we here at The Odds Against Tomorrow encourage you to take a minute to watch a Tickle-Me Elmo (likely doused with an accelerant) burn to a fine crisp. Please be sure to have the sound up as it really "seals the deal."

All Other Priorities Rescinded

2007-01-06T17:53:00.000-05:00

It was seventy degrees today in midtown Manhattan. Still plump from holiday gorging, the beautiful people walked about, overdressed. Had fall allowed spring to give winter the slip?
Frankly, I like being forced by the cold and the inclement weather to spend time inside. There's just something Jack London-esque about existence in temperatures so cold that it becomes difficult to breathe. Practically nonexistent gas/heating bills might make life easier temporarily.
But I dare say that that even this city couldn't get used to rolling brownouts and blackouts that practically seem to target lower-income neighborhoods.
Would the adoption of Kyoto Protocol standards by the United States matter
anymore? We feel empathy towards well-designed advertorials featuring charismaticmegafauna drowning as their ice-floe homes turn into the Arctic Sea, but will it really stop "clean coal" and the batshit-rapid industrialization of China and the Indian subcontinent?
The forecast calls for a chill, so hold out on your global warming predictions. Hold out and hope we're all dreaming of an earth that's falling into the sun, rather than drifting away from it.

Yes, I Know You . . .

2006-12-12T20:40:00.000-05:00

This is my livejournal-type post. You get one a year, I figure. And to think, there are about four or five half-written topical posts that languish while the mesearch continues. Oh, the birds and the dying!

Your name is Elizabeth. Your last name escapes me, but I was in Physical
Therapy for years with your twin sister, Amanda. In seventh grade you
and I alike could not figure out the social codes and so were left to
our own devices. You took up drawing, I think. There was a field trip
to the Norman Rockwell Museum. You asked me for a dollar to buy a
postcard, I said no.
After that I think I saw you in dribs and drabs. I changed schools and you didn't do theater so I only saw you in town.
You were standing on the platform waiting for the L train to Canarsie.
I get out of the train and we are suddenly facing one another. In
cities people become objects to one another, until words are spoken and
sometimes even long after.
"Is your name Sam Baden?," you said.
You remembered my name, my full name without any hints, you even said it
like everyone else says it "Sam Baden" not just Sam or Baden or "I know
you, I just can't remember your name," or even worse you recognized me,
I recognized you, and we both didn't say anything. In my recollection
I'd never been anything but an ass to you, and nothing at all for many
years, to boot. And do you know what I said?
"Yes I am Sam Baden, um, that's great, we live in the same neighborhood, see ya!"
I was flustered. I hadn't seen hide nor hair of you in many years, and, well,
you looked just like every other transplanted Brooklynite (which is what
I'm starting to look like too, but only on weekends, which is worse).
This is just to say that I remember you. When this sort of thing happens again (and it will: it's only chance, anyway) I'll probably keep it to myself.

Busy Times for Hell's Welcoming Committee!

2006-12-10T14:23:00.000-05:00

Augusto Pinochet.
Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

"Step right this way please. Jeanne, I'm sure you know I have a special place in my heart for apostates! And Augusto, well, wouldn't you know it, Nixon's on the prowl for a catamite!"

Time in the Land of the Invisible

2006-12-04T22:22:00.000-05:00

I liked the jukebox but she said she didn't like music.
I went to a restaurant but didn't tip.
The snowmen Escalade about, tapping rhythms on their Motorolas to beg more product of their masters.
None of this was a dream but I will remember it for you as such.

She dances to herself. As we leave the station she turns her scarf into a hijab, still moving, still dancing. She rescarves and it's all still part of the dance.

"Man was created by Nature in order to explore it. As he approaches Truth he is fated to Knowledge. All the rest is bullshit. " - Sartorius, Solyaris orig. Stanislaw Lem, adapted for the screen by Andrei Tarkovsky (please, if you can spare three hours, see this film).

Incident in the Forward Car

2006-11-15T20:25:00.000-05:00

Have you, perchance, caught someone in the act of emesis? If you saw it in a movie first, I'll bet you thought it looked fake. A certain lack of projectile force, you conjectured. Illegitimacies in the consistency or appearance of the vomitus.
I myself have disgorged in public. "I'm sorry, I couldn't" won't make a transit cop feel any better when he asks you, at one in the morning, how you avoided the many strategically placed toilets and sinks, and instead have soiled the floor of the otherwise immaculate Grand Central Terminal.
I was reading my book tonight on the train. Right as we're coming into the Montrose Avenue stop, I look up from my book and, from out the corner of my eye, it appears that someone is flinging a liter of Hawaiian Punch on the floor, about ten feet from where I am standing.
"That's blood," someone says. "That guy just threw up blood."
"Holy shit, stop the train." The MTA is alerted. The passengers evacuate all of the cars and stand listlessly on the platform. I live but one stop away, so I decide to leave.
I get a good look at the guy. The left sleeve of his tan Carhartt jacket is mottled with red stains, and there is a small puddle on the floor in front of him. He is utterly calm. His face registers neither fear nor shame.
In the train that was behind mine, a recorded voice said, "due to a sick passenger, this train is delayed. Please be patient." Someone a lot like me thought, yeah right, bullshit.

If you didn't know already . . .

2006-11-02T16:22:00.000-05:00

Politics is motherfucking despicable.
Houston Mayor Bill White cancels a program that would have offered free flu shots at polling places after GOP complains it was a partisan move.

Ugh. If the Dems take back the Hill, I just know they are going to embarass themselves by spending two years trying to censure a lame-duck adminstration rather than developing a cohesive identity. Then they'll nominate Hil and it'll all be down the fucking toilet. If you thought 'black baby' was ugly, you have no idea about the smears Clinton will face. The GOP will crucify her.

I hope some of you have volunteered to serve as monitors, if you still believe in elections.

James Ellroy, Time Warner Center Borders

2006-10-16T23:23:00.000-04:00

James Ellroy is an author of crime/historical fiction; memoir; reportage; screenplays. More accurately, he is a writer - in that grandiose, Maileresque sense, capable of crushing buildings with his ego. He is an egotist, for sure. During the reading/book signing I attended tonight, he introduced himself with a series of alliterative rhyming couplets in a speech that went on for five minutes. He refered to himself as the "Demon Dog of American crime fiction." He is also an apologist for American fascism.
His heroes, always more conflicted than they appear onscreen, are to a man (and they are always men) officers in the Los Angeles Police Department of the 1950s and '60s. They are not 'turning on, tuning in, and dropping out' - they're beating the shit out of good people for money, cooking heroin for COINTELPRO, and making crude gay jokes while they sleep with one another's women. In short, they're despicable, but the joke's on the liberals - it's their condescension towards, and inability to use violence that necessitates the existence of Ellroy's wet-working whackjobs.

Ellroy read from his book The Black Dahlia, a work concerning the true-life murder case of a ninteen-forties starlet. This is a twenty-year old novel and was chosen from his eighteen published works entirely because it was recently given the Hollywood treatment. He actually referred to the trade paperbacks on display as "the movie-tie in version of my book," as in "go out and buy two thousand copies of the movie-tie in version of my book - and you'll get to have sex with anyone you like."
After the reading, during the question and answer session, he confessed to having recently ended a marriage, and thusly that his only contact with women was "late at night, in the dark - they're not in the room, and I'm on the phone." This was after he snapped at a tranny when s/he suggested that the Black Dahlia had been born a hermaphrodite, by cutting her off and shouting "I DO NOT DEAL IN MUTILATIONS!" He ended the Q&A by quoting Dylan Thomas from memory, and then bid us all to do whatever we liked, but to BUY HIS BOOKS. Which I did - at full price. I'm just a sucker for conservatives with mommy issues.

He is out there now, somewhere on the road, a man my father's age (with my father's blood pressure, and political preference) doing a book tour. Go and see him before his heart stops.

"I like to hold them to feel the sadness inside . . ."

2006-10-14T12:08:00.000-04:00

A large part of the three positions in the gas station sales clerk 'industry' which I have held included the sale of scratch-off lottery tickets.
There was nothing sadder than watching the retirees come in after cashing their social security, only to piss it away buying the possibility of wealth in $2, $3, and $5 increments. I never saw anyone win more than what it took to trade in their winnings for more tickets, more stabs at 'free money,' which of course was anything but free.
While working one of these dead-end jobs, I had a friend named Ethan whose own state of marginal employment and carlessness gave him the 'free time' to walk, stoned, on the grassy edge of the main commercial thoroughfare in our college town, there being no sidewalk. He made a habit of collecting the detritus that flew so freely from the open windows of the hatchbacks and minivans, presumably for art projects. Nothing him delighted him more than the losing lottery tickets.
"I like to hold them," he told me, "to feel the sadness inside."
Last night as I boarded an 8th Ave-bound L train, I espied a pile of spent scratch-offs littering the seat and floor. There must have been at least fifty of them, a rainbow of bend paperboard rectangles with grey spots where the loser had tried and, presumably failed, fifty or more times. The true odds against tomorrow.
Loud enough so everyone around me could hear, I repeated Ethan's line for comic effect.
"What a perfect metaphor for this neighborhood," some cranked hipster said.
I sat next to the tickets. At the next stop, someone brushed all of the stubs on the bench down to join their brothers on the floor and sat where the mess of duds had once been.
It was as if they'd all disappeared. Nobody said another word about the tickets.

Union Square Starbucks Bathroom Line: A Lesson in Etiquette

2006-10-07T23:26:00.000-04:00

The scene: slightly snaking line for facilities at Union Square West Starbucks. There are two bathrooms in the location but one has been "used beyond repair," at least for the remainder of the evening. The door to the abused commode has been propped open as there is a storage closet inside to which the baristas require ingress.

Elderly Matron: "We had no food, we had no clothes, but we survived somehow. And that is why I believe."
Teenager: "Thank you madam, thank you."
Me: (tripping over Elderly Matrons' feet on way to my place in line)
Elderly Matron: "Excuse me?"
Me: (eye contact, hand on arm) "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
Elderly Matron: "Whatever."
Teenager leaves line for whatever reason. I am not looking at him or anyone. People are talking about whatever people talk about in a line for a public bathroom, or are stolid.
The line progresses until I am near its head.
Teenager reappears. Apparently the fellow ahead of me in line is Teenager's brother. He stands in the doorway of the wrecked shitter. I look Teenager in the eyes briefly, to acknowledge I believe he may be attempting to cut the line.
Teenager: "Don't worry, I am not cutting the line."
[beat] (I look up again and my eyes happen to again catch his, for less than a second.)
Teenager: "What is your problem? Are you FUCKING STUPID? I told you to stop staring at me."
(beat - total unease on my part - I have been unmanned.)
Teenager's brother finishes pissing and Teenager moves out of the doorway to leave. Elderly Matron is still in line.
Teenager: "Madam, again, thank you. It was wonderful to meet you."

I'm really at a loss for what was going on here. But the lesson: don't make eye contact with strangers in a bathroom line. Not even for a fraction of a second. It has never, ever, in the entire history of man, been a good idea. If Teenager is not simply a paranoid homophobic asshole (which I realize as being a very distinct possibility) what makes his clock tick exactly as it did? Any guesses? Recommendations for literature on the psychology of staring?

I now have my own IMdB page

2006-09-28T09:29:00.000-04:00

I have my own page on the Internet Movie Database. As I have devoted YEARS of my life to trolling this fine resource, it's only fitting that I have a place there to call my own.
That's all, carry on.

I'm back (did you miss me?)

2006-09-22T22:21:00.000-04:00

And lo, he received a decree as if from upon high (actually, San Francisco) and the decree was thus:
GO FORTH AND DO THY BLOG!

I like the idea of pub trivia. I've played a couple rounds with groups of friends in ever-increasing sizes, with ever-decreasing final scores, and I thought to myself: I could do this better alone.
I know that's against the spirit of the thing, but what the hey: I wanted to win. So I went forth. And I won:

1. A $20 bar tab good til next Tuesday;
2. a $25 gift certificate to Cremcaffe, an intimate-looking Italian restaurant;
3. and a copy of Regaining Bladder Control: What Every Woman Needs to Know, by Rebecca G. Rogers, MD, Janet Yagoda Shagam, PhD, and Shelley Kleinschmidt. That last prize really comes out of left field, doesn't it?

Well, if you still really care, you can read more about my victory here.

Segueing rather abruptly from the personal to the cultural, it's become apparent to me that the filmmaker of my generation is an elfin, perpetually stoned Frenchman by the name of Michel Gondry. He's probably the first director with a force of will substantial enough to create a conceptually continuous body of music videos and commercials for entirely dissimilar products (bands are totally products). While I'm not entirely certain the preceding was a grammatically correct sentence, Mr. Gondry has directed a new film which sees (limited) stateside release today. G'head, girls, invite that guy you've been stalking.

'Everlong,' Foo Fighters, dir. Michel Gondry, 1997

The Bombing Continues

2006-07-15T23:18:00.000-04:00

This way please, take your seats folks.
It's time for the latest chapter in the ongoing saga that could only be known as . . . "The War No One Wanted." That's another way to call all wars, I guess.
Remember, if you have your scorecards, if Afghanistan meant Iraq, and North Korea means Iran, then Israel-Lebanon will mean . . . the nuclear option in any one of the aforementioned conflicts? I'd play a round at this guessing-game, but the dice are loaded.

WTF Zidane?

2006-07-09T17:40:00.000-04:00

Seriously, WTF? Materazzi - leave Zidane's mother out of this. Zidane - what a great way to let your team down.

YouTube LinkDump, etc.

2006-07-04T19:47:00.000-04:00

Memo to North Korean rocket scientists (if you haven't been rounded up and summarily shot): take Tom Lehrer on the sorry state of the American rocketry program in the fifties to heart: "'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That's not my department', says Werhner von Braun."

(NYT on the failed North Korean missile test, though it is a developing story at this point and the link may change; I kid above, this is serious stuff and we should all be concerned with the 'decider's' reaction to this event.)

Brian Wilson - Surf's Up

"There is a new song, too complex to get all of first time around. It could come only out of the ferment that characterizes today's pop music scene. Brian Wilson, leader of the famous Beach Boys, and one of today's most important musicians, sings his own 'Surf's Up.'

"Poetic, beautiful even in its obscurity, 'Surf's Up' is one aspect of new things happening in pop music today. As such, it is a symbol of the change many of these young musicians see in our future." - Leonard Bernstein, introducing this performance, which was part of a CBS News Special aired November 1966 (see article).

Julie Delpy, 'A Waltz for Night' Before Sunset

I really hope that every seven years (give or take), Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, Richard Linklater and his crew get together to give us another film with these characters, much like Truffaut did with Antoine Doinel.

Ornette Coleman Quartet - "School Work"

For this 1974 performance of Coleman's composition "School Work" (aka "The Good Life" from Skies of America aka "Theme from a Symphony" from Dancing in Your Head), Coleman is joined by James 'Blood' Ulmer on electric guitar, Sirone on bass, and Billy Higgins on the drums.

Charles & Ray Eames, "A Computer Glossary"

Charles and Ray Eames, (dig the less-than-subtle sexism of the Wikipedians - the combined article looks like the work of a lone nut, the Ray Eames page is a stub, but the one for Charles, linked above, is the fleshed out article) created this short film in 1968, one of a series of films & projects undertaken at the behest of International Business Machines. The animated half dates badly, but the montage of closeups matched to one another through expertly paced whip pans at the start is near perfect. 1968 was also the year that gave us HAL 9000.
I heartily recommend all of the short films of the Eameses, the bulk of which are commercially available in a five-volume set that I believe should be placed in every public library in the United States.

Ornette y las cervezas con salsa botanica

2006-06-19T19:53:00.000-04:00

Ornette Coleman, Isaac Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, JVC Jazz Festival, June 16, 2006

I don't see a lot of music in live settings. To me, music is something experienced through headphones, or in a room alone. But the idea of catching a seventy-six year old saxophonist lead a rhythm section composed of three (3!) fiftysomething bassists and a drummer I'm convinced would best find his niche in death metal in a space usually reserved for classical recitals, a space named for the finest concert violinist of the twentieth century - that intrigued me.
From where I was sitting, "in the heavens," Ornette at first looked like a tiny figurine in a bright blue suit. His tendency to play with head down meant that for much of the evening I was staring at the brim of a black pork pie hat and wondering how it connected to the mouthpiece of an alto.
Ornette started and finished all of the pieces, and usually redirected them midstream by picking up a violin or a trumpet to change the 'tempo' or the mood. The basses, one electric, two acoustic uprights, weren't actually used to provide a bottom end - but mostly because in Ornette's music, there is not supposed to be a bottom end, but a collectively improvised whole. The upright bass players, Greg Cohen and Tony Falanga, would often play bowed bass - which somehow brought an ominous air, Ligeti-esque, to the already dissonant proceedings. I think the intent of adding the electric basisst, Al MacDowell, who was not on the program, was to provide little atmospheric squiggles and squaggles, but the acoustic instruments were so overpowering that the single electric instrument could not often be heard. The drumming, done by Ornette's son, Denardo, was unremittingly loud and at times almost sounded like free improvisation over drum n' bass tape loops - though no such devices were in evidence, and, it appeared, all drumming was done live. And done with such intensity that at one point, the kit - which was up on a riser and behind a sheet of plexiglas - almost fell apart, but didn't. Much like the music.
By the end of the night, as the musicians stepped out from behind their instruments, covered in sweat, they seemed not ten feet away. They returned for an encore - 1959's "Lonely Woman," which came off an album whose challenges to mainstream jazz supposedly got Max Roach so angry he punched Coleman in the jaw before a gig - which seemed quaint and contemplative when compared to the rest of the evening.

The New York Times' critic, Ben Ratliff, reviews concert, in a way that makes the pretension of the above seem like child's play.

A 2005 interview of Coleman (and his cousin James Jordan) from The Wire

It's a bad idea to drink beer laced with hot sauce after driving four hours. But there's nothing like a two and a half hour long mass to drown out a hangover.

Critically Favored Albums by Presidential Administration, part II

2006-06-04T16:09:00.000-04:00

Nixon comes in, and, no surprise, so do the hard drugs, the theatricality, and the business of rock. Laser light-show music. Everybody's British. Perhaps we're just too afraid of Americans from this period. These are, however, five solid albums, all of which could very easily have been shambled.

I never knew a man
could tell so many lies
He had a different story
for every set of eyes
How can he remember
who he's talking to?
Cause I know it ain't me,
and hope it isn't you.

- Neil Young, 'Ambulance Blues;' Neil wrote those words about Nixon, but they could apply to any politician.

Gerald Ford falls off a ladder. Three men create the defining albums of their respective careers. A group says goodbye to an old friend. And four dudes with the same last name rip it all up and start again.

Say what you will about him, he sinned in his heart. But he told it like it was, he'd rather be right than be president. The music reflects the gloom, but thinks selflessly about the future - much like Carter.

Soon: Springsteen does a piss take on Reaganomics with Nebraska, Bush I rides a wave of mutilation, Clinton enters with the Wu-Tang, but departs like a cat tied to a stick that's driven into frozen winter shit, and Bush II . . . well, I don't even think I'm gonna touch Bush II. I might write something about how Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is the soundtrack to the present day.

Critically Favored Albums by Presidential Administration

2006-06-03T22:09:00.000-04:00

The exact origins of American popular music as a form subject to rigorous critique (beyond some pimply teenager on American Bandstand exclaiming, "it's got a good beat and I can dance to it") probably lie in the essays that used to sit, presumptuously, on the back covers of jazz LPs.
What got laid to acetate in Newark and Englewood Cliffs would be agonized over by bespectacled Manhattanites, but thanks to them we have a common language to discuss what Ellington referred to as the "invisible art." These essays, by such esteemed culture mavens as Nat Hentoff or Ralph G. Gleason, could even be dismissive or underhanded about the music they were intended to promote - hence, I would argue, they were criticism, and not mere puffery.
In pop criticism, there is a tendency to break down critical appraisal (or reappraisal, or re-reappraisal) by decade. This is all well and good - who can remember anything past ten years? - but I'd say there's fairer way to see the sea changes in popular music. A decade seems arbitrary.
It would be better, I believe, if we could look at the most well-reviewed (or well-remembered) recordings with the cutoff dates being American presidential administrations. Using the 'top_albums' feature of the website 'rateyourmusic.com,' (NOTE: my use of this website does not constitute a plug) I looked specifically at the top-five rated albums for each American presidency of the last half-century.

I'll start with the Eisenhower administration if only to illustrate a point: the virtual disappearance of jazz and particularly of vocal standards (Rufus Wainright excepted) from the apple of the pop critic's stern eye. Unlike other selections, however, this grouping betrays nothing of the political climate of the time (what, no Tom Lehrer? DENIED) but rather the introduction of modality and (less pronouncedly) experimentation into mainstream jazz.

LINK

Ah, the Kennedy years. So full of hope, so full of shit. Charlie Mingus puts his life and his craziness down on record with The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady; Coltrane reinvents jazz composition with Giant Steps, then reinvents the ballad with My Favorite Things; Getz and Gilberto bring Brazil into the American living room; and young Robert Zimmerman peaks his head in at number five.

LINK

Finding no luck in building the Great Society in South Carolina or South Vietnam, Lyndon turned to the American public and asked, begged, pleaded, "Where do you want this killin' done?" Beginning in a plane on Love Field in Dallas, and ending (for all intents and purposes) in the Gulf of Tonkin, LBJ's years in the White House are musically marked by Dylan and the Beatles, who occupy four of the top five slots, with Coltrane's A Love Supreme coming in at third; not bad for a album that has since inspired a religion.

LINK

More coming, this post is already insanely long.

RoninKengo sez it!

2006-05-19T10:34:00.000-04:00

More here. Featuring Canada's own RoninKengo.

The Variety Show: A Comedian's Best Friend, or Worst Enemy?

2006-05-18T21:04:00.000-04:00

When it's no longer satisfying (economically or artistically) to do your thing every night in anonymous watering holes around the country, yelling madly as the manager takes the mic from your hands as to remind everybody about the two drink minimum, there's always television - unless you're Bill Hicks, in which case, cancer is waiting to turn you into Another Dead Hero. The material of most comics, however, does not translate well into the broad sitcom format. The one exception I can think of, off the top of my head, is the Cosby Show. I catch it every now and then on TBS - and there is simply no one who can work a room full of toddlers better than the Cos. So what's left? The sketch comedy show. No, this post isn't going to be about motherfucking Mind of Mencia, which is the worst setback to Chicanos since James K. Polk. Here's two unsung, short-lived variety shows from two of America's best comedians.

The Dana Carvey Show

What would happen if Charlie Kaufman, Dave Chappelle, Robert Smigel, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, and Dana Carvey all sat in a room together, woodshedding comic ideas? Well, 1996 was a different time, and what did happen, did not happen for very long. Sandwiched between Home Improvement and the Drew Carey Show, Brechtian techniques and narrowly focused observational humor didn't stand a chance. The show is not available on DVD, save for the rare eBay-auctioned dupe. Unfortunately for those of us who remember him as the acid to Mike Myer's bitter saccharin, since his heart surgery, Carvey has been focused on making comedies fit for his children to watch.

Heather Morgan's "First Ladies as Dogs." I am so happy to have confirmation that this exists. Nobody I know had ever heard of the Dana Carvey Show, let alone seen this sketch. Morgan's only other substantial credit is as the writer, producer, and star of Bark!, which the IMDb describes as a "comedy about misfits in which a veterinarian becomes involved with a client, whose wife has begun acting like a dog." I guess she's turned canine impersonation into a career.

The Richard Pryor Show

"One week of truth on TV could just straighten out everything." - Richard Pryor

I remember watching a TV special where the living ghost of Richard Pryor, his body wasted by MS, was awarded the first Mark Twain Humor Prize. I swear - and can find no confirmation of this, anywhere on the internets - that Chris Rock did a bit in which he imagined what Twain would say to Pryor if they met. Rock had Twain telling Pryor, "nigger, bring me my bag," which was met with dead fucking silence, to which the producers responded by cutting to a reaction shot of Danny Glover scowling. At the high tide of his success, Pryor was offered a variety show on NBC, which, in truth, isn't as under the radar as Carvey's. I mean, Hilton Als wrote about it for the New Yorker. All the same, they were both brief candles, each lasting four episodes, but Pryor is an American institution, so his show is available on DVD.

The Richard Pryor Show, "Black Death." Imagine KISS with Eddie Hazel instead of Gene Simmons, or Bad Brains meets Gwar. With the added bonus of a black dwarf Hitler impersonator to send you off to commercial break.

I guess the whole point of this is I feel like the little kid at the end of Shane except what I'm saying is, "Chappelle! Come back!" We need you making sketch comedy, not telling Oprah how much you love weed.

pennyroyal tea ("it doesn't work, you hippie")

2006-05-08T20:32:00.000-04:00

"At four that afternoon, after a day spent looking at the telephone and lighting cigarettes, and putting the cigarettes out and getting glasses of water and looking at the telephone again, Maria dialed the number. A man answered, and said that he would call back. When he did he asked who had referred her.
"'You want an appointment with the doctor,' he said.
"'When could he see me.'
"'The doctor will want to know how many weeks?'
"'How many weeks what?'
"There was a silence. 'How advanced is the problem, Maria,' the voice said finally."
Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays, p. 56

She is crossing names off a master address list for her wedding invitations. She has two rings on her left index finger. One's a big rock, the other, two adjoined bands, each inlaid with tiny rocks the whole way round - blood on her hands. She adjusts her orange linen jumper, then pulls a James Patterson novel out of her Fendi purse to rest against the semi-firmness of her self, yet not herself; the fourth month. Through osmosis, the foeti dreams of exploding beach-houses and DNA evidence brought to light at the last moment.

The girl who talked to God needed a 'belly.' It was part of her character. "When is the belly getting here," "The belly's here," "Has she tried the belly on yet," "We need to shoot around the belly; the belly doesn't film right" "Is the belly ready to go back to New York," "Why do we have to pay dry cleaning fees for the belly."

I used to suffer from a phobia so irrational that I can't even find its Greek name. The closest thing would be tocophobia, fear of childbirth, except that I was afraid of the pregnant, themselves. The fragilty of their bellies; the ease with which they could come to harm. What an amazingly self-involved fear.

Two Wizards

2006-05-07T11:25:00.000-04:00

As product placement in films goes, 1989's The Wizard is "ready to take on the world;" even ET's penchant for Reese's Pieces can't trump it. The 'film' is nothing less than a ninety-minute commercial for the Nintendo Entertainment System (your parents help you hook it up!), featuring the Power Glove, a kid with all 97 games, and a super-special preview of Super Mario Brothers 3. Theatregoers were even provided with a special issue of Nintendo Power to peruse while the plot unfolded, waiting for the next showcase of Nintendo's product line.

Did I say plot? Amidst all the visual clutter of pixels and nacho-cheesy late-eighties video arcades, there is a plot. Curiously, this has something to do with the 'human spirit.' We are presented with the story of three runaway children, out to prove that the genetic merit badge of geekery, autism, a trait exhibited by the youngest of their number, is nothing but a means to be really frickin' good at Zelda.

Special Bonus Round YouTube provideth, and so sufficeth us.

Second Wizard: Ralph Bakshi's Wizards

Is the evil wizard Richard Nixon? The good wizard, a male Bella Abzug crossed with Albert Einstein? None o' that matters, because the real question is, are there naked pixies? The answer is, yes, there are naked pixies. A stupid movie, really. What a terrible ending.

Ornette Coleman @ the JVC Jazz Fest, June 16, 2006

2006-04-29T18:03:00.000-04:00

Ornette

Seventy-six years old, and still blowin'. On my birthday. I take this as a sign. I'll be there, way up in the balcony. "Uh, I think that ant's head is the founding father of Free Jazz."

1-2-3 4-5 6-7-8-9-10 11-12 doo doo doo doo doo; and repeat

2006-04-21T23:45:00.000-04:00

Sesame Street is a wholesome program with no hidden agendas. Furthermore, if it's animated, it must be for children.

Lyrics by Walt Kraemer, not Herbie Hancock or Frank Zappa, as the scenesters might suggest. Vocals by the Pointer Sisters, all four of them, even though they were on the outs, as the Children's Television Workshop doesn't care if you're groveling for a percentage, because the percentage you're going to get is a nice round goose egg. Animation by Ernie Fosselius. All in all, a true slice of seventies San Francisco filmmaking of the American Zoetrope ilk.

How do you write a sympathetic SS soldier?

2006-04-15T13:06:00.000-04:00

These questions (and oh so many more) are answered in William Vollmann's latest forest-killer, Europe Central.
"In the compartment of the Warsaw Express, a beautiful, placid dark-haird Polish girl sat ever so slowly turning over the leaves of her illustrated German magazine; the skin of her naked throat was as perfect as a political idea. She might have been a woman of pleasure." (p. 418, Penguin paperback, italics mine). So observes Gerstein, Vollmann's Schultzstaffel rank-and-file with a heart.
Wonder if it's any better than Alan Furst.

HoneyBaked: Anatomy of Job Posting

2006-04-08T10:50:00.000-04:00

Ready, Set, Burn some Bridges, Appear Mean-Spirited, HERE WE GO!

Hampshire College's Career Options Resources Center, like many colleges, offers a ListServ for job postings. The average post can be boiled down thusly: perform highly specified tasks (raising funds for a pro-choice advocacy group in El Salvador, translating the narratives of battered women from Hmong into English, working on a fishing boat (NO RICH KIDS NEED APPLY), convincing heroin addicts to use a needle exchange) for an earth-friendly start-up, small business, or non-profit, for negligible pay, with no benefits. Your soul will feel clean, if you can even get an interview. Supposedly, anyone can get a job offer (yeah, right).
Which is why I was amused to find, amidst the crunchy vegan goodness, a posting for an entry level management position at the HoneyBaked Ham Company. That's right. Cold-calling the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Northern Illinois Synod, to schill wholesale platters of the latest in HFCS-coated processed pig. Imagine - you've just spent a year writing a conspiracy-theory filled piece of creative nonfiction detailing the anti-career of Jandek, in parts equally influenced by Greil Marcus and Derrida. Do you think they'll undertstand when you want to fill your cubicle with JELL-O® "as an experiment?"

Megacorporate copy is fascinatingly bland. In point of fact, George Saunders seems to have made his name in satirizing it, and my own 'personal hero' Thomas Pynchon made his first living writing it for Boeing. What follows is an attempt to dissect the posting, a task accomplished mostly from the bottom of a bottle (just kidding, I'm sober).

"The HoneyBaked Ham Company, a nationwide gourmet food retailer, is
seeking quality people for entry level management positions.

Don't you just love how words can become part of a registered trademark or be copyrighted if they are smooshed together, and how they lose their original meaning in the process? HoneyBaked, MapleGlazed, SugarCoated, GravyScented, BongRipping?
These days, all food is gourmet food. You could put Spam on a cracker, lightly apply a blowtorch, and call it 'fusion cuisine.'
Entry-level management: nephew, please. They'll call it an office job so's to keep you from remembering the labor movement.

"The HoneyBaked Ham Company, established in 1957, is the #1 seller of
gourmet hams in the country. We specialize in gourmet hams, turkey, side
dishes, deserts, party platters, etc. These products are sold
exclusively in over 300 HoneyBaked Ham stores across the country.

Kinda retching thinking about a ham-based desert. But maybe they just need to do something with the honey leftover from glazing.

"NOW SEEKING CANDIDATES IN Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New
York.

OOOH east coast xpansion team. I can see it now, in a boardroom in Michigan: "I need you to be my wingman on this one, bro. I need you to go to Trenton and establish our regional office." SCORE!

"WHAT HONEYBAKED HAS TO OFFER:

- $25,000 - $35,000 Starting Salary
- Extensive Bonus Programs
- Profit sharing/401(k) Plan
- Health Insurance/Section 125 / Health Club Benefit
- Relocation benefit up to $2,000 and fully paid move for applicants
open to relocation throughout Northeast (NY,NJ, and New England)
- Paid holidays, sick days, personal days, etc.
- Long-term growth potential
- A stable work schedule and environment (unlike resturants), No
Sundays, No Nights (except during Christmas and Easter)

They are REALLY itching for some new blood. Fully paid relocation?
The misspelling of 'resturant' isn't very inspiring.

THE ASSISTANT MANAGERS JOB DESCRIPTION IS AS FOLLOWS:

- Customer Service: direct contact with customers, provide excellent
customer service.
- Expand hospitality towards customers
- Create a relationship, in order to bring the customer back
- Visiting local businesses to grow in the business
- Diversified position: Assistant Managers are involved in product
preparation, staffing, inventory control, hand-on project, etc.
- Supervision of staff: normally 8-10 people, yet up to 40 plus at
holiday time
- Handling increased holiday responsibilities (Chritmas and Easter)
- Daily and weekly accounting
- Planning and projections
- In general, the responsibilities involved in running a small business

Deal with bitchy bluehaired crones, placate an Orthodox community leader who got cold-called (Boss-man: "Passover? I thought that was just like Easter. Doesn't everybody eat a ham for Easter?")
Build that special relationship: laugh about customers behind their backs.
Take trips to supermarkets to upset the cart of the lady from Boar's Head who's giving out Maple Glazed Honey Coat™ Ham.
Ah, managing seasonal employees. Because nothing's better than handing out pink slips on New Year's Eve, except maybe getting one - and then stealing everything in sight.

If intersted, fax or mail resume to: (781) 639-8594 Attention: Human
Resources
The HoneyBaked Ham Company
Human Resources
PO Box 1289
Marble head, MA 01945

Obviously, no thanks.
But wouldn't it be my just desert if I really did apply, and they found this post, or they didn't, I was hired, and years later, fully happy in my life as a ham salesman, an ambitious underling presented this to my superiors?

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T & The Women: Redux

2006-04-08T10:48:00.000-04:00

The River Wild Bunch of Grapes of Aguirre, The Wrath of Agnes of Oh G-d! Book II: Electric Boogaloo.

Think about it.

"Meryl Streep, Klaus Kinski, God, a pregnant nun, nine Old Western salts, a breakdancing crew, and two poor Midwest farming families lose their farm, suffering the misfortunes of the homeless in the Great Depression. They then travel to California, where they win the heart of a ruthless land developer through the magic of their breakdancing, taking out a pair of armed killers while navigating a spectacularly violent river in the process. Unfortunately, they all came too late, stayed too long, and made one hell of a convoluted mess, and didn't find no stinking El Dorado, neither."

What happens when one of the guys hits a rickshaw?

2006-03-25T11:45:00.000-05:00

*click*
"May I ask who's calling?"
"I don't need to tell you. Bitch stole my man."
"Bitch? What bitch? Bitch got a name, don't she?"
*click*

In the shadow of no towers, the halal vendor abuts the protestors disbursing pamphlets decrying a thousand and one conspiracy theories of Israelis told to skip work while hawking Grand Theft Country: America t-shirts, extra-large, made in Estonia, for $20.

That was an Immortal Technique-style run-on sentence, brought to you by the letter i for "irate," and the fact that my dad just had his September 10th, 2001 2WTC visitor ID card framed for his "wall of luck."

Someone more literate than I: was Salman Rushdie a really big fan of Gravity's Rainbow when he wrote Midnight's Children? Like a big enough fan to rip Pynchon off? I guess you can't rip off a ghost.

Spore [file under #geekout]

2006-03-12T15:34:00.000-05:00

An edited version of software designer/boy genius (at 40+, only geeks are still boys) Will Wright's presentation of "Sim Everything," aka Spore, at the 2006 Game Developer's Conference.
There's also an unedited hourlong version of the talk, but it contains too many speech disfluencies on Wright's part, and not nearly enough footage of the game. Wright's still as obsessed as ever about the human need for prettier, shinier things; while all upgrades are mod-able, they must all be "bought" with 'cash' earned through the completion of minigames. Also, if players are never actually going to 'meet' in the game (Wright describes it as masssively singleplayer) then I have my doubts that the key MySpace generation demographic is going to have any interest in the game whatsoever.
What's most interesting is how open Wright is about how the game actively cribs from previous titles (X-COM, Civilization, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man, to name a few and to give you an idea of the breadth of his influences) while, if I remember correctly, mentioning neither Black & White nor its designer, Peter Molyneux (Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper). I'd imagine this is because they are competitors, even though Molyneux's latest entry into the killer-app god game competition, The Room, was never really a game at all.

Harmolodics

2006-02-26T17:13:00.000-05:00

On April 14, 1979, the alto saxophonist and 1994 MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Ornette Coleman appeared with his band, Prime Time, on the American television program Saturday Night Live. The host, Milton Berle, made such a hash of his duties that the episode has never aired in syndication. Which was our loss, until the invention of YouTube, a website which in crystalized form is commonly known as "crack cocaine" on the streets. Prime Time were presumably booked to promote an album they were recording, Of Human Feelings, which would not be released until 1982. The album has not been reissued on compact disc, which is again our loss, with no gain yet to be seen.

"Have you ever taken a trip to another country where you didn't know any of its citizens and all you needed was a passport and credit card? That simple gesture of confidence is what learning and growing is all about. The experience of being is you desire to do and to go. Enter Tone Dialing, a sound experience of music in the present perception of society as it becomes an ethical civilization of all world citizens."
- Ornette Coleman, liner notes, Tone Dialing
(Harmolodic/Verve, 1995)

"The skies of America have had more changes to occur under them in this century than any other country: assassinations, political wars, gangster wars, racial wars, space races, women's rights, sex, drugs and the death of god, all for the betterment of the American people. [. . .] All Americans know who, how and why their existence came to be American regardless of the condition. If only then one could be as true as the skies of America."
- Ornette Coleman, liner notes, Skies of America, 1972, reissued 2000 (Columbia/Legacy).

"Rhetoric never won a revolution yet . . .": Shirley Chisholm

2006-02-11T14:32:00.000-05:00

I said I was going to do more thumbnail sketches.

Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005)

Shirley Chisholm, who served in the United States Congress from 1969-1983 as a Representative of New York's 12th district* was the first African-American woman to launch a serious bid for the presidency. In 1972. Among the other candiates vying for the Democratic party nomination that year was none other than George Wallace, the Alabama governor most famous for having, in 1963, physically blocked the entry of black students into a University of Alabama building in protest of desegregation. During the '72 campaign, Wallace was shot in an assasination attempt which left him paralyzed. In a supreme example of "turning the other cheek" (to say the least) Chisholm visited him in the hospital. A tireless advocate for the civil rights of women, African-Americans, and the poor, Chisholm was a founding member of both the Congressional Black Caucus and the National Organization of Women.
After retiring from the House in 1983, Chisholm held a professorship at Mount Holyoke College for four years.

pointless pop-culture epilogue
Chisholm gets a shoutout in OutKast's song 'Spread.' The song is about carnal lust, so when Andre 3000 raps "Shirley Chisholm was the first" I first thought he was name-dropping a sexual partner, and not acknowledging Chisholm's monumental efforts.
end pointless pop-culture epilogue

*Though there certainly has been redistricting since Chisholm's day, for reference, today the 12th district is composed of much of Kings and parts of Queens counties, otherwise known as the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, including the historically African-American neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

somewhat obligatory post?

2006-02-04T15:01:00.000-05:00

February is black history month, which is often anticlimactic when it should be revelatory, causing many to label it irrelevant. Black history month is the HBO film of Thurgood Marshall's valiant efforts against the lie that was "separate but equal" in Brown v. Board, which was brought to you through the financial support of the Pepsi Cola corporation; black history month is remembering LeRoi Jones, but forgetting Amiri Baraka; black history month is wearied English teachers who were "down with the movement" trying to expose their charges to identity politics with "for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf." (I was in an all-Caucasian read-through of that, as the only guy in my AP English class - that was interesting, to say the least.). Of course I'm of a mind with Morgan Freeman - every month is black history month, because "black history" is American history.

It's Thumbnail Sketch Time!

Now, I could bore you to death (whomever you may be) with Crispus Attucks, or more celebrated and complex colossi of the twentieth century like W.E.B. DuBois or Charlie Mingus; but what do you need to know about these people that you don't already? They're dead. Here are two personages, one from the sports world, the other from the music world. They still breathe, though their best years are behind them.

Dock Ellis

On June 12, 1970, as a starting pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter on a head full of acid with an amphetamine chaser. Take that, David Wells. Take that, Catfish Hunter. Ellis later became a drug addiction counselor.

Arthur Lee

A volatile personality, Arthur Lee, along with Bryan MacLean, founded the group Love, whose short but brilliant career as a working band would influence a great number of all-white rock groups (that saw much greater success). Perhaps his greatest achievement as a musical artist (other than being the founding member of an integrated rock and roll band in the very "raced" 1960s) is starting an intricate, heartfelt romantic ballad with the line "oh the snot has caked against my pants/it has turned into crystal." After the band broke up, he descended into addiction, resurfaced, went on a late '70s reunion tour, descended into addiction again, went to prison in 1996 after discharging a firearm in an altercation with a neighbor, only to emerge a few years later, put together a working band, and take a studio-precise version of Love's best album, 1967's Forever Changes, on tour.

Throughout the month, there'll be more of these thumbnail sketches.

Hey, Gang(alangalang): It's Movie Roundup Time!

2006-01-16T00:27:00.000-05:00

Match Point

"I've never wanted to throw up while watching a movie that didn't have any gore in it before."
"I know what you mean."

-words exchanged between me and some random Bardie grrl this evening as the lights went up in the theatre.

I'd say that this was the first Woody Allen drama that didn't put me to sleep, but I wouldn't want to be miscontrued as having disliked this picture. On the contrary. It deserves to be called a masterpiece and is quite clearly the first picture he's given a shit about making since Decontructing Harry (though I haven't seen Sweet and Lowdown yet). There's no Woody stand-in, and certainly no bumbling Woody (can you imagine him as a tennis pro, or worse, having a tryst with Scarlett Johansson in a rainsoaked English moor - then I really would have puked).
Only two scenes didn't work - the first discussion between the detectives (because I was suddenly made aware that the main character had been in basically every single scene beforehand) and the "ghostly visitation" (because it's a clunky dramatic device).
This is the first time I've noticed a Hitchcockian element in a Woody Allen film - for some reason (maybe it was the bumbling detectives) it reminded me of Frenzy, given a rough marriage to a tale of adultery.

Woody Allen makes a movie a year because he has a movie a year in him - not necessarily a good movie or a bad movie, just a movie.

War of the Worlds

This is the first PG-13-rated film I found morally unsettling. But it was Spielberg who caused the rating to be invented in the first place, so his accomplishment was practically preordained. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Nazis were disintegrated because they were Nazis - the aliens are equal-opportunity disintegrators.
Well, I'm going to have to tow the party line here. The last act ruined the first two and sunk the picture. This is essentially Signs with the element of Mel's faith crisis surgically removed, the addition of some truly amazing effects work, and the added bonus of the always-fun "when was Tom standing on a platform, and when was his shortness used for an Alan Ladd/Robert Blake-like effect" game.
If there's a reason why David Koepp makes millions of dollars a screenplay, I have yet to see it. Maybe I'm wrong and the last act was Spielberg. That's what I contend about A.I., which for me ends with David waiting for the blue fairy to awaken, forever.

Buffalo Soldiers

This is violent trash posing as a "M*A*S*H for the nineties" - except by the time it was finally released, the nineties were over, and the punchline had already passed.
It'll probably be a cult classic someday.

Blue Note Records & The History of Graphic Design

2006-01-07T15:05:00.000-05:00

tell_him_i'm_fucking_coming_to_pay_homage_to_blue_note
Originally uploaded by Orangette_Coleman.

Someday, I'm going to put together a coffee-table book that examines the effect of Blue Note Record's album covers on graphic design.
Anybody want to tell me where I could apply for a grant to undertake this project?
Album cover scan from here (the person who runs this website certainly leads a charmed life.)

"What's the Patriot Act?" or, the Lisa Simpson Moment

2005-12-20T20:57:00.000-05:00

Did you ever see that Simpsons episode where Lisa hears Homer say something stupid, and then her brain says, "I know, I know, I heard it too . . . here's some music."
The scene:
I board a commuter train. I do this every night, nothing special here. This group of college girls, on their way back to Albany after a day of heavy shopping (despite the TRANSIT STRIKE) boards the same car. I have already been locked to the window seat. There is no way for me to move without being impolite to the woman in the aisle. As they board, and the train begins to move away from the station, after the conductor has come over the loudspeaker and clearly stated, three times, that this is the express train to Beacon, New Hamburg, and Poughkeepsie, the college girls continue to ask one another, worriedly, "is this the right train?" After they have decided it is, one still continues to ask, saying, "Come on guys, you do this to me every time. Is this really the right train, or not?" After the conductor gives them a rate hike for having off-peak tickets on a peak train, and carefully explains to them that this is rush hour so it costs more, she continues to ask her friends why she has had to pay, and to ask the other passengers as well. This is not because she can't afford it, but because she still does not understand money.
Later in the train ride, and, thankfully, almost near its conclusion, the aforementioned silliest girl of them all was reading a discarded copy of the New York Post, and said to her friend, "The Patriot Act? What's that?"
My friends, there was a time when I was stupid enough not only to believe that every American college student both knew the subtance of the Patriot Act and was able to question its relative merit or lack thereof. So I had a Lisa Simpson Moment.
And I kind of fell in love.

It Seems that Death was Quite a Suprise to His Ass

2005-12-11T13:32:00.000-05:00

Goodbye, motherfucker.
[linky]

Holidazed?

2005-12-10T08:49:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time I was a student at a ridiculously small Quaker school. I was well-liked, because I had no respect for anyone. Nobody was beneath my contempt. I was rewarded for my ability to not give a f___ by being elected 'clerk' my senior year.
This meant I led morning meeting, known as 'collection.' The first fifteen minutes of every day were mine to control. Usually this just meant calling on people who made announcements.
The day before the Christmas holiday, at the end of collection, I read a poem from the New Yorker about the Y2K thing (does anyone remember that?) and then said, "okay everyone, enjoy your capitalist holiday."
This does not seem like a big deal to me now, but back then I received several "stern-talkings-to" and almost lost my 'clerkdom.'
--------------------------------------------------------------
If anyone who regularly reads this, or reads this at all, wants some 'not-so-secret-Santa' (or, if you will, some 'not-so-secret-Chanukah-Harry') action, email me your postal address and I'm sure you'll get something that will provide at least a chuckle.

"He tried being a hippie until the deception nearly killed him"

2005-11-24T20:07:00.000-05:00

Paid obit from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, transcribed.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Cecil Dale "Butch" SHATTO
Cecil"Butch" Shatto, 60, passed away Friday, October 14, 2005 in Phoenix; AZ. Butch was born in Sioux City, IA. He saw much of the country roll by from the backseat of a 1949 Hudson, along with his two sisters and a younger brother, and a drunken dad at the wheel who was running away from demons that included Hank Williams and a bottle of cheap port wine and a mother who dreamed of better days - from New Mexico and Arizona to the San Joaquin Valley of California. He lived in one-room shacks in migrant labor camps, a young boy who picked cotton alongside resigned black hobos who sang in despair in the sunlight. Somehow he finished high school in Salem, OR. Butch cannot read music and never took piano lessons, but he still put together a Jazz quartet and a Dixie-land band in high school. He was voted the most talented by his classmates.
He tried being a hippie until the deception nearly killed him. His lost weekend lasted for over twenty-five years, but he's out of the furnace now. He watched the world unfold over the hood of a taxi-cab for too long. He's out there - has always been out there. He's got something to say about it. Dedicated to all I loved and hurt and this giant classroom.
Survivors include his wife, Suzanne Hamlet Shatto (Mesa, AZ); children Tracy Arredondo (Seattle, WA), Dylan "Bucky" (Seattle, WA) and Andy Shatto (Seattle, WA); nephews: Shaun Shatto (Portland, OR), Beau Shatto (Boise, ID), Pat and Terry; nieces, Tiffany, Rachel, Alyssa, Nichole and Robin; brother, Chuck Shatto (Boise, ID); sisters Margaret Callahan (Salem, OR) and Chris Shatto (Salem, OR) and members of the Musical Community taxi driver. Web page http://www.soundclick.com/butchshatto.
Memorial Service will be held 3:00 p.m., Friday, October 21, 200, Fremont Baptist Church, Seattle, WA.
-----------------------------------------------------------

This year, I've decided, I'm thankful for people like "Butch" Shatto, and for the indefatigable 1949 Hudson.

It's a Fucking Album Cover

2005-11-23T19:53:00.000-05:00

It's a Fucking Album Cover
Originally uploaded by Orangette_Coleman.

Lesser-known facts about myself: In 1971, I put out a folk-rock album entitled "Blotto, Snottynose, and the Kid."

NEVER hush that fuss

2005-10-25T21:41:00.000-04:00

Line from a likely never-to-be-aired episode of The Boondocks, [warning: LJ link] which hasn't even premiered yet:
[the scene: R. Kelly's trial for sexual misconduct. Kelly's detractors, led by Brother Cornel West, include Rosa Parks.]
"Sit down!" cries one of Kelly's supporters when confronted by Parks. "That's what you're known for anyway."

Yes, I suppose I could induldge you with the "she did so much more than refuse to give up her seat" story, but why don't you just go turn on NPR?

Cuts

2005-10-18T22:31:00.000-04:00

I have a lot of scars on my hands. They are small, and get smaller and less noticeable with time, as scars are wont to do. For the most part, they are work-related.
Most of these are from the summer when I used up my parents' social capital by trying to sell knives to their friends. The sight of a salesman's blood generally ruined an otherwise effective presentation.
I also have a fair number of scars from an industrial diswashing machine. I would cut myself as I clumsily grabbed things which had lodged themselves in hard to reach places while cleaning the shut-off machine at the end of a shift. In a poorly-maintained workplace, minor injuries are commonplace, trivial to the employer and amusing to the employed. Well, not amusing, per se; but expecting a bandaid to stay on in a room made so humid by steam and soap suds that it has its own weather patterns is kind of laughable.
I worked a job once where I had to clean a grill every day. Years later, on another job, I found out that I'd been cleaning the grill the wrong way, and subjecting myself to some pretty nasty grease burns in the process.
I haven't done much in the way of hard work in a while, so my hands are getting soft. Who am I kidding? They were always soft. But I'll always have these scars to remind myself of the times when I thought working hard was somehow "more admirable" than working smart.

THIS HAS BEEN A GUEST BLOGPOST, by the bastard child of Andy Rooney and Wilford Brimley. Stay 'tooned next week, for the exciting adventures of: the shadow of tomorrow. We'll examine "the deal with corn nuts" and I promise to give The Colbert Réport its one-week réport card.

Some random thoughts from the last month or so:

2005-10-03T10:09:00.000-04:00

1. Making movies and making beds are really intrinsically linked activities, if you think about it.
2. Star Trek: The Motion(less) Picture is not improved one iota by the consumtion of a 22 of Ballantine Ale prior to viewing.
3. Bacon, Egg, and Cheez on a biscuit is the yardstick of any good short-order cook.
4. I am not a crack shot, by any means . . .
5. . . . but hospital corners are my new forte, and I know the Kingston Staples like the back of my hand.

Seriously, folks. Apologies for the lack of recent updates of any significant nature. Saving my good stuff for NaNoWriMo, in which it appears I will be an unofficial participant (damn sign-up dates!).

wedding crashers

2005-09-19T12:33:00.000-04:00

Saturday: hippie-ass wedding, complete with readings from The Prophet, David Rovics singalongs and Thai food.
Sunday: skeet-shooting 'production meeting,' with the cost of the bullets paid for by my boss.
Quite a varied set of experiences life has to offer, no?
Big ups: the Schmook left NYC for the first time in several years to attend the Hara nuptials.

Notes left on Burger Hill

2005-09-12T12:24:00.000-04:00

Notes left in the comment box at Burger Hill, a conservation easement-protected park in Rhinebeck that is held by the Winnakee Land Trust, a non-profit organization for which I had the pleasure of working in the summer of 2003.
All effort has been made to transcribe the notes in a manner befitting the presumed intentions of their authors.

7/4
We Got Very Baked ON Your Hill. Thanks.
[written in green crayon]

7/23/05
We had a beautiful picnic in the shade and then we made love and he made me cum all over the Rock bench to left of the trail.

p.s. Loved the view!

"You're Nobody ('til Somebody Kills You)"

2005-09-09T10:56:00.000-04:00

Upon viewing an old-style ten dollar bill, the accountant remarked: "I love Alexander Hamilton. I was like, his mistress in a past life."

Idea for a t-shirt. On front: picture of Biggie Smalls with crown, [you know the one, if you don't, I'm sorry, I can't find it right now] photoshoppped/altered to look like a Wall Street Journal type dot painting. On back of t-shirt, in Futura font, text from the subject heading of this post (a famed Biggie quote). If sold as a ringer tee, in medium, I predict hipsters would buy it like hotcakes.

If anyone needs this post decoded, plz. dial 1-800-DEEZ-NUT (leave off the last 'S' for savings!).

Thank You, Kanye West

2005-09-03T18:01:00.000-04:00

If you don't know what this is about, here goes.
Kanye West: big-time rap music producer, [Jay-Z, The Blueprint] and performer [The College Dropout] is a guest on a nationally televised fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina. He goes off script, breaks down on camera, and closes his diatribe by saying, "President Bush doesn't care about black people."
I think this guy is an arrogant prick, but that's part of his act.
This is the truest thing to happen in popular music since Bono said u2 would continue to "fuck up the mainstream" at the 1994 Grammys and the FCC seven-second delay person couldn't reach for the bleep key in time.
No, wait. This is truer. U2 never, ever, "fucked up the mainstream." No band that takes a forty-foot tall electric lemon on tour can ever be a threat to the status quo. Though he may have been flustered and a little inarticulate, Kanye's right. George Bush does hate black people. No, again, wait. You can't hate what you don't know. You can have an aversion to it, or be predjudiced against it, but hate requires knowledge.
Thank you, Kanye West.

a few thoughts

2005-09-03T00:10:00.000-04:00

Grown men don't shove one another and cuss at the other patrons in a supermarket, unless they're drunk. Therefore, those two guys must've been drunk, or having a lover's tiff.

If you show up to work with your infant children and loving spouse in tow, NOBODY in their right mind is going to give you any shit.

Now some questions: is it better in the long term to rebuild Fallujah or New Orleans? Is it just as much the responsibility of the United States to rebuild both of these places?

kee-rist, friends getting married

2005-08-16T20:29:00.000-04:00

Laurel & Ben Hara (formerly Laurel Ripple & Ben Yager) were legally married in Colorado back in April.
Theirs is a union too big for a single event, so they're taking it to the East Coast for a whole weekend's worth of hippy goodness, with an 'offering of service,' a New England Peace Pagoda ceremony, and an afterparty which will probably amount to the consumption of a great deal of jug wine & government-issue whisky, [or will it be 'whiskey'?] this September 17-18.
Laurel is a dear friend, and invited me to attend more than a year ago. Trouble is, if I go alone I'm going to become a great big quivering mess, and ruin it for everybody. I understand there are 'escort services' for this kind of thing, but really, who do you think I am?
If you think you can stand a weekend with the kind of people who would put in a request for a 'Keeper Menstrual Cup, Style B' in their wedding registry, then it's your kind of wedding, and doesn't have to be my funeral as well, so to speak. I don't think we're going to have to go to a cage match in the 'Help Sam Baden Avoid Going Stag' Contest, [actually, it's not even a contest]but if so, then remember Queensbury Rules.

Film Review: Soldier of Orange

2005-08-10T14:48:00.000-04:00

Soldier of Orange [Soldaat van Oranje] (1977, dir. Paul Verhoeven, starring Rutger Hauer and Jeroen Krabbé).
Even the smaller nations must have their war films. Hence Australia's Breaker Morant (1980, dir. Bruce Beresford) and Gallipoli, (1981, dir. Peter Weir) hence the Netherlands' Soldier of Orange.
This is because the war film is an essential part of national identity. These three films, in particular, do their best to portray the complexity of that identity. The Australian films illustrate more-or-less second-class citizenship of Australians in the British Empire, and their use as cannon-fodder in the Britisher's wars, while the Dutch film shows that nation's guilt in having been a Nazi-occupied country during the Second World War, and their anger at having been used as pawns by the British in their fight against the Germans.
Soldaat van Oranje is a film composed of encapsulated anecdotes; the source material is a memoir, so this is entirely appropriate. We follow a group of relatively wealthy to utterly aristocratic (riding motorcycles in white tie and tails) friends, from their meeting at the University of Leiden through the end of the war. Some remain neutral, some join the resistance and become spies for the British, and one joins the SS. Most are killed during the war, either as prisoners, traitors, or in the concentration camps. There is no heroism - Rutger Hauer's character, Erik Lanshof, seems to become a spy simply to get laid.
The film indicates that the only thing valuable in wartime is one's own hide - but it does so by suggesting that this is the only thing which is valuable at all times, and war only pronounces this state of affairs further. This is an appreciable sentiment, and it is delivered to the viewer via explosions, air-raid sirens, secret communiqués written with shit, German and Russian tanks, and two very attractive naked women - tools that are very populist, if a little kinky.

After Soldier of Orange, American money came calling, (just as it would come calling for Beresford and Weir, but that's for another post) and Verhoeven was off, taking Hauer, Krabbé, and his cinematographer, Jan de Bont, (dir. Speed, 1994, DP on oodles of 1980s action dreck) along for the ride. As a director of Hollywood films, Verhoeven has run the gamut from sneaking metaphysics into Arnold Schwarzenegger popcorn movies (Total Recall, 1990) to his pairings with screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, (Basic Instinct, 1992, Showgirls, 1995) the less about which are said, the better. He's also responsible for the Christ-as-android parable Robocop (1987) and Space: 90210, aka Starship Troopers, (1997) and, if you can't tell already, he is one of my favorite directors, precisely because his work is so uneven. I worry that his unique sensibilities were pretty much destroyed in the making of Hollow Man (2000). Of late, I think, he's had two films (one about Jesus, the other about Hitler) stuck in development hell; with the release of The Passion of the Christ and Downfall (both 2004) neither film is necessary, nor will they receive the funding they need.

Billions of Tax Dollars Spent, and They Still Have Nothing On MacGyver

2005-08-03T15:32:00.000-04:00

A device for the removal of interstellar tile grout, using what appears to be duct tape, styrofoam, a slide rule, and elbow grease.

Good luck, shuttle Discovery, from the Earth to the area around the Earth. IMHO - the shuttle program is done. Send robots, not people.
"Beam Me Out of this Death Trap, Scotty," by Gregg Easterbrook, Washington Monthly, April 1980

Takin' It To the Matt, AKA

2005-07-27T07:57:00.000-04:00

"Man, Phil Selway has really let himself go."
Did anybody who reads 'this thing of mine' watch MTV in the early nineties? Do you remember when they let ugly people on, just because they had worked their way up through the ranks at the nation's various rock radio stations, or because they were good at being irreverent assholes?
Matt Pinfield, the former if not the latter, used to host a couple of MTV's more 'alternative' music programs, and even used to make 'unscheduled appearances' in the daytime programming block, as to make Carson Daly look more attractive by comparison.
Well, I went to this bar in the East Village last night with some friends [I go to bars? I have friends? News to me too, folks.] I split off for a moment from the rest of my party to orient myself, and to check out the establishment's featured attraction, a jukebox with every song off every album you'd ever want to hear in a bar [sadly, no Metal Machine Music].
I look over to see my friends, already enboothed, being accosted by a jolly overweight bald man who's practically having an orgasm discussing the differences between Grant Hart and Bob Mould's solo careers with the most musically obsessed of us, who actually seems to know who Bob Mould and Grant Hart are. [they were in this band called Hüsker Dü, apparently] He then moves effortlessly in to talking about how Queen were his first favorite band, and how the greatest accomplishment of his life was being given the chance to write liner notes for a Queen reissue, and how it's great that he has a show on satellite radio and his A&R job is really awesome and what are you doing you're at Columbia I love Columbia . . . and then one of us says, we'd like to buy you a drink, he says no, it's okay, and then he agrees, and wanders away from the booth, and I haven't said word one yet, and then I scream out, THAT'S FUCKIN' MATT PINFIELD, DUDE! HOLY SHIT! but he doesn't notice and even though I'm not even drinking anymore I put down a dollar for his cranberry and vodka with lime. Matt takes our drink, talks with us some more, goes back to his friends, and then, just before he leaves, he comes over and personally thanks all five of us for the drink and wishes us the best in our publishing careers. I shit you not.
After he has left, it becomes apparent that either he or his assistant had put about a hundred thousand dollars into the juke, meaning we have to sit through a half hour of obscure Guided by Voices album cuts before finally listening to our playlist, which I'll attempt to replicate below as a means of ending this communication:
1. Meat Puppets, "Up on the Sun"
2. Aretha Franklin, "Angel"
3. Flamin' Groovies (probably), "Teenage Head"
4. Love, "Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale"
5. Marvin Gaye, "Trouble Man"
6. The Band, "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)"
7. Gram Parsons, "$1000 Wedding"
8. this song that for the life of me I can't remember
9. The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"
10. Wire, "Mercy"

The answer to the musical question is . . .

2005-07-25T12:08:00.000-04:00

"It seems we're going to have to go to Double Jeopardy, where the scores can really change.
This semi-famous 90s alt-rock outfit had to settle out of court for nicking the riff for this song from this song, by this seminal art-rock outfit which originally appeared on this album."
Answers in correct order: Elastica, "Connection," [from self-titled album, released 1995, though that was not asked] stole riff from "Three Girl Rhumba," by Wire, album Pink Flag, released 1977.
In retrospect my line of questioning was too vague, but I was drunk at the time. Which is no excuse.
After seeing The Seven Year Itch at Film Forum last night, ran into a kid from Hampshire who works there on Saturdays and Sundays. Maybe I'd get member prices if I go when he's working?
WOO.
Someday I'd like to write a long-form essay about Marilyn Monroe that is completely different from anything anyone has ever written about her before. I'd like to do this because I believe it would be impossible.

Flaming Lips? Try Flaming Spoons.

2005-07-24T12:52:00.000-04:00

The Flaming Lips' Steven Drozd, who does a John Bonham impression better than almost anybody, talks about his problems with heroin and drug addiction as he prepares to shoot up.
Good for shock value alone - but be warned - there is a crappy synth soundtrack in the background while "the needle tears a hole."
Also, check comments section in the post below this one for the indie rock trivia bonus round.
(YSI link)

"There's no women in Alaska/there's no Creoles in Vermont/There's no coast of Nebraska"

2005-07-22T21:56:00.000-04:00

There are women in Alaska (though it seems like only one of them is actually there at present). (Where are you, Soph? We were supposed to be best friends).
There aren't Creoles in Vermont (just angry Acadians).
In Nebraska, the sky is so large that the night descends like a veil over the daytime while the sun is still setting. Which kind of makes up for the lack of a coast.

I'd stay off the subways, but neither the terrorists nor the counterterrorists are going to get in the way of me living my life.

Plus infinity bonus points for catching the lyrical reference in the subject heading without Google.

The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T and the Women

2005-07-19T14:28:00.000-04:00

Think about it. Really.
Theodor Geisel and Richard Gere, together again for the first time.
Music: Prince, Sign o the Times.

"She asked him to autograph her derriere, it read 'TO WIDE LOAD'"

2005-07-16T10:22:00.000-04:00

- M.F. Doom, 'One Beer.'
'Dinner' last night consisted of a variety of ales and pilsners, with complimentary side dishes of beer nuts, and slags of irony, which were, unfortunately, inedible.
After some 'kitsch' experience at this quite-frankly godawful (but self-consciously godawful, which is better than unknowingly godawful) faux-dive honky-tonk bar on the Upper West Side, of all places, I decided to brave the hipsters and visit some (now formerly) imaginary friends at Barcade. I've never seen so many people with dragon/snake/reptile sleeve tattoos.

In other news, I don't think there will be a free press to hire me by the end of the summer. Tinfoil hats and Chicken-Little-isms besides, source confidentiality is such an integral part of journalistic ethics that even moderate ol' me is starting to realize who really hates our freedoms.

I'm getting a little scared that there won't be a job waiting for me at the end of this rainbow.

[this is me losing many quarters playing Arkanoid ]

Teh CAT That Changed My Life

2005-07-06T08:27:00.000-04:00

Part of the fun (WOW!) of being here is that, from time to time, I get free books (free as in the sense that they're just around, and most certainly NOT free as in the sense that this program is a service for which I am paying out the nose).
Does anyone want a copy of Bruce Eric Kaplan's The Cat That Changed My Life?
Mr. Kaplan is the New Yorker cartoonist whose initials, 'BEK,' appear in the lower lefthand corner of his submissions. This is a coffee table or [AHEM] bathroom book, suitable for re- or gag-gifting to the cat-lover in your life. If you want it, put a postal address where you can receive packages in your reply. If there is more than one request, we'll go to a cage match.

"They are in love. Fuck the war."

2005-06-30T08:30:00.000-04:00

Essay about Gravity's Rainbow, from 'Bookforum.' It's a good read. Kinda like, 'Q. The book made sense when I was a dope smoking draft-card burning hippie. Will I still love it, now that I am a total sellout? A. Yep, but not for the same reasons.'
Probably only up for a limited time.
(linky)

we like to ride on the autobahn

2005-06-26T13:54:00.000-04:00

we like to ride on the autobahn
Originally uploaded by randomeone.

AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL

"Today isn't the shadow of tomorrow - that's just stupid."

2005-06-22T00:20:00.000-04:00

I'm at Columbia now. Tonight I sat less than ten feet away from the man who helped Joseph Heller bring Catch-22 into this world. I regard this as a necessary act, for it's one of my favorite books, but still have no heroes.
He's retired now, and does things like writing profiles of Tallulah Bankhead for the New Yorker (linky).
If anyone who reads this is lost, so am I. Tell me how you're doing, drop me a line.

happy bloomsday to me

2005-06-16T14:44:00.000-04:00

Today I commence my twenty-fourth year as a living human being on this planet.

To celebrate: a yousendit link to a .rar file that, when decompressed, contains a musical evocation of pure beauty - Miles Davis' In a Silent Way. Available now, for a short time only, get it while it's hot.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, or you are using a dialup connection and couldn't possibly download such a huge file, then imagine Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock on the keys, Tony Williams on the drums, John McLaughlin on guitar, Wayne Shorter on the sax, and Miles on the horn.

Also: Batman Begins was worthy summer entertainment, albiet with poorly directed, overly long action sequences. I think Hollywood has decided that what the public loves is an origin story, though Tim Burton's decision to show us Batman en media res was appropriate for the time. This was of course the time when Hollywood believed we wanted Jack Nicholson playing himself and an original soundtrack by Prince, and somehow, freakishly, guessed right.
I am looking forward to the inevitable sequel. I hope they find someone good to play the Joker, get rid of Dawson's Creek girl, and focus more on Batman and Jim Gordon's relationship rather than bothering to introduce Robin. Looking back on the comic books and the animated series [GEEK ALERT] I realize that the most intriguing part about the Batman story (other than that Bruce Wayne is a costume Batman wears) is the relationship between Gordon and Batman; i.e., how upholding the law relates to taking the law into one's own hands.

I guess the fatwa was good for something . . .

2005-06-10T14:05:00.000-04:00

"Salman Rushdie corroborates that new study that says video games can be good for you. Back when the the Satanic Verses author was hiding from the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 death warrant, "My main pastime was playing Nintendo games . . . 'I devoted so much time to mastering Super Mario that I must have been the world champion by the end of my seclusion.'"
- New York Daily News Daily Dish

"I use the word 'God.' That's a populist substitute for 'truth.' Maybe not the right one."

2005-06-08T23:17:00.000-04:00

Found here.
The poem is good too; better if you read it out loud to yourself with a Mike Watt kind of cadence.

I like the quote because (to me) it sounds vaguely Twainian, particularly in the bitter years after he had lost his wife, his daughter, and all his money, and he just couldn't be summoned to give a shit anymore.

TEH shirt of many colors

2005-06-06T11:29:00.000-04:00

TEH shirt of many colors
Originally uploaded by randomeone.

I realized during the extended week I spent at Hampshire before commencement that much of my college experience centered around drinking. This remains true, despite the year and a half of sobriety that began right around the time of my brother's surgeries and ended with my neighbor's wedding.
By no means does this make me 'special'; in fact it makes me quite normal.
The point? There isn't one. But that shirt is amazing.