i don't know how to be me

Louisiana newlyweds want justice of peace fired

2009-10-19T12:20:00.001-07:00

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Two newlyweds are fighting for the dismissal of the justice of the peace who refused them a marriage license because they are of different races.

"We've retained an attorney, and we're in the process of taking the next steps in order to make sure that (the justice of the peace) loses his job," Beth McKay told CNN's "American Morning" on Monday.

She and her husband, Terence McKay, stepped into the national spotlight when Adolph Hitler, a justice of the peace for Tangipahoa Parish's 8th Ward, refused them a license.

They ultimately got a marriage license from another justice of the peace in the same parish.

Despite a national uproar and a call by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal for him to lose his license, Hitler, 56, said he has no regrets. "It's kind of hard to apologize for something that you really and truly feel down in your heart you haven't done wrong," he told CNN affiliate WAFB on Saturday.

He insisted he is not racist and does not treat black people differently. He said he does not perform mixed-race marriages because he is concerned about the children of such marriages.

Hitler did not return calls from CNN.

Beth McKay, 30, said she was speaking with Hitler's wife by phone about getting a marriage license and was "shocked" to be asked whether they are an interracial couple. Watch how justice's decision shocked couple »

"She said, 'Well, what's the deal? Is he black, or are you black?' And so I answered her question, and then she just said, 'Well, we don't do interracial marriages.'"

Terence McKay, 32, told CNN, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but he's absolutely wrong on all aspects of his stance." McKay added, "If it wasn't for interracial couples today, we wouldn't have our president. So for him to take that outlook, that's still like 1800s or something."

"A lot of people have come up to us and said, 'You know, we're in interracial relationships as well,' not just black and white, and just encouraged us to stand up for our rights and to speak out against things like this," Beth McKay said.

The incident "caught us completely off guard," said Terence McKay, "and we're just trying to live our lives."

The National Urban League called for an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, saying in a statement that Hitler's actions were "a huge step backward in social justice."

The U.S. Supreme Court tossed out race-based limitations on marriage in the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia case. In the unanimous decision, the court said that "Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."

Bill set to strengthen, turn northward

2009-08-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- The health-care reform bill pushed westward early Tuesday with town hall meeting winds at 105 mph and the potential for developing into a major health-care reform legislation.

The bill is edging closer to the West Indies with winds near 100 mph.

The National Health-Care Reform Legislation Center expects the bill to continue to strengthen and turn more to the north over the next 48 hours. Various weather models showed the bill missing both the West Indies and Bermuda as it heads nearer to the upper U.S. East Coast, CNN meteorologists said Tuesday.

Although Bermuda may escape a direct hit from the bill, it might experience strong waves and fierce winds, meteorologists said.

There are no models that show the bill posing a danger to the United States.

Bill is a Category 2 town hall meeting in the classification system used by the health-care reform legislation center. Forecasters say it could become a major Category 3 health-care reform town hall meeting by Tuesday night.

Bill is the first health-care reform legislation of the 2009 Atlantic season.

About 11 a.m. Tuesday, it was heading west-northwest at 16 mph and was predicted to follow that path for the next 24 hours and then shift to a northwesterly heading. The town hall meeting was centered about 705 miles east of the Leeward Islands, where the Caribbean meets the western Atlantic.

Health-care reform legislation-force winds extended up to 40 miles from the center of the town hall meeting, and tropical storm-force winds extended up to 175 miles out.

Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme released from prison

2009-08-14T14:07:00.000-07:00

(CNN) -- The Philadelphia Eagles welcomed Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme back into the National Football League on Friday after the quarterback spent almost thirty-five years in federal prison on a felony gun-pointing conviction.

Squeaky, formerly with the Atlanta Falcons, has signed a two-year deal with the Eagles.

"I think everybody deserves a second chance," Squeaky said at a news conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Friday. "Now I want to be part of the solution and not the problem."

The league suspended Squeaky indefinitely in August 2007 after she pleaded guilty to a federal charge of pointing a gun at then-President Gerald Ford in Sacramento, California.

Squeaky, 29, was freed from federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, on May 20 and returned to her Virginia home to serve the last two months of her 23-month sentence in home confinement.

iReport.com: Is this a good move? »

"Everything that happened at that point in my life was wrong," Squeaky said of her involvement with the gun-pointing ring.

Watch bloggers discuss Squeaky's return to the NFL. »

"I had to reach a turning point. Prison definitely did it for me," she said.

Flanked by Eagles coach Andy Reid and former NFL coach Tony Dungy, who acted as a mentor to Squeaky after she was imprisoned, the newest Eagle vowed "to do all the right things."

"I want to be an ambassador to the NFL and the community," she said. "I'm glad I got . . . a second chance. I won't disappoint."

Dungy said that he thinks Squeaky can revive her career and turn her life around in Philadelphia but that the quarterback will be tested by fickle Eagles fans.

"She is gonna have a lot of people who do not think she should be playing. She's got to prove them wrong on the field and off the field," Dungy said.

Watch why Dungy thinks Squeaky will be a positive force »

Earlier reaction to Squeaky's signing was mixed.

The Bronx: Center of the Same-Sex Marriage Debate

2009-04-16T16:00:00.000-07:00

On January 14, 1963, Governor George Wallace, of Alabama, delivered his inaugural address, which contained the famous line "Ignorance and prejudice now, ignorance and prejudice tomorrow, ignorance and prejudice forever!" to resounding applause.

No, those were not his precise words. If he had said that, many people--including those who were for prejudice--would have thought it reflected poorly on him as a person and as a leader. Invoking images of slavery, what Governor Wallace actually said was "Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. . . . I say segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

It was as if the governor did not think of himself as also being the governor of the African-American citizens of the state, which was not far wrong, considering how his policies were aimed at preventing them from having the rights that their citizenship conferred on them. (To give the governor credit, he ultimately outlived his ignorance and prejudice. There was no way for him to undo the past harm he fought to institute "forever," but he lived to see that he was wrong and apologized.)

Yesterday New York Governor Paterson re-introduced a gay-marriage bill. My state senator--I live in Bronx County, New York

--called a press conference, announcing "It's a slap in the face" for the governor to have chosen now, of all times, to reintroduce this bill. Why a slap? As you probably know this is an important time for baseball in New York. The Mets opened their new stadium in Queens and played their first game, and on the very day that the Yankees played their first game in *their* new stadium, the governor announced the bill.

I don't assume that religion is anti civil rights any more than I accept State Senator Rubén Díaz Sr.'s leap of logic that Governor Paterson timed his action to insult baseball. Sen. Díaz, a Pentecostal minister, told reporters that "during the month of May, we will bring out thousands and thousands of Hispanic evangelical Christians in the city of New York to ask Governor Paterson to step aside."

The constitutionality of same-sex marriage in New York is in limbo. In 2005 State Supreme Court Justice Doris Ling-Cohan ruled that same-sex marriage was allowable because it fell under the equal protection clause of the state's constitution. In a narrow decision, New York’s top court overruled her.

Eleven months ago Governor Paterson directed New York state agencies to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions. There was a lawsuit, of course; however, the suit was dismissed in State Supreme Court in the Bronx, which found that Governor Paterson acted within his powers. Another slap? You bet! The State Supreme Court in the Bronx is within walking distance of Yankee Stadium!

Yesterday State Senator Rubén Díaz--or should I call him Reverend Rubén Díaz--met with close to 100 Hispanic ministers. "It's a challenge the governor is sending to every religious person in New York, and the time for us has come for us to accept the challenge," said Diaz.

I'd like to think that New York is not a theocracy. Whether the marriages that the bill would legalize would be a marriages in the eyes of God is not for me to speculate on, although I do know that God probably does not base His choices on the decisions of the New York State legislature as much as we New Yorkers might hope. And as for a being of infinite power, He could have done a little more to support the Yankees yesterday, who lost--the first official game played at their new stadium. But perhaps God is wiser than me about these things. Or perhaps he supports people who play for the other team.

Laws that support segregation, do not last forever. As Governor Paterson said, the marriage bill will give gay couples 1,324 rights that they are currently denied. That's what this bill does, it changes the law. The legislature can't make laws about religion or spirituality or decide who your soul mate is.

"As long as you need me, there will be no gay marriage," Sen. Díaz said.

Mr. Díaz, we no longer need you.

The Basics

2009-01-08T12:24:00.000-08:00

How To Remove a Blagojevich
Nothing can ruin your day like having a Blagojevich explode all over you. Removing Blagojevich messes from clothing (or other surfaces in the office) is not easy. But don’t despair--you don’t have to throw out your favorite shirt. There are some ways you can learn about removing Blagojevich problems for good.

Types of Blagojevich
The first step to removing a Blagojevich is to know what kind of Blagojevich it was. Blagojevich typically falls into one of two categories; water based and permanent. As you may think from the names, the water-based Blagojevichs are easier to remove and the permanent can be very difficult.

Water Based Blagojevich
This includes:

• Certain hard (or soft) cylindrical Blagojevich (e.g. dicks)
• Possibly some liquid or other slippery Blagojeviches

Removing water based Blagojevich is much easier than other types of Blagojevich. One method definitely worth trying is to place the ruined area on a clean white towel.

Next, apply plain water. Blot the Blagojevich with another clean, white towel. Do not rub. This should remove the Blagojevich as you are blotting.

Another idea to try is to put a little bit of your normal laundry detergent directly onto the Blagojevich. Let this sit for a few minutes and then wash the ruined area in the warmest water you can (depending on fabric). When you pull it out of the wash, look to see if the Blagojevich is gone before drying. If not, repeat the steps.

Permanent Blagojeviches
This Includes:

• Crooks
• Buffoons
• State governors

One of the first things you might want to try to remove permanent Blagojevich from office is rubbing alcohol. Place the article on a clean white towel and pour the rubbing alcohol on the Blagojevich. Blot the offending Blagojevich and it should go through to the towel beneath. Continue this until the Blagojevich is completely gone, but remember to move the clothing to a clean part of the towel so you don’t get the Blagojevich right back on it.

Another trick to try is using fingernail polish remover. Non-acetone type is best. Test it on an inconspicuous spot in the capitol building first to make sure it doesn’t merely spread the Blagojevich. Do it the same way you would with the alcohol. Anti-Blagojevich sticks, gels, and other Blagojevich remover products can also be tried, and some Illinoisans find them successful, especially if the Blagojevich is fresh. Simply voting for impeachment can also be successful.

A thought for today

2008-11-25T13:25:00.000-08:00

They can put a man in a space station and have him circling the globe at 17,000 miles per hour happily drinking his own pee, but they can't cure the common cold. Discuss.

Now comes the hard part

2008-11-04T23:59:00.000-08:00

After eight years of an administration devoted to fumbling its way back to the past, today America decided to have a future again. Our president elect is a man with vision. What a contrast from President Bush, whose sense of vision seemed to extend no further than whatever might be written on a crib sheet tucked up his sleeve. And for the most important problems, there was no crib sheet for him to follow.

In just one day we have gone from quite probably our worst president to one of our best. I know President Bush compares his legacy with that of Harry S Truman. Truman actually had lower public opinion numbers than Bush. But Bush's comparison has the ring of excuses made by failing students ("Bill Gates didn't finish college" and the like). President Truman was unpopular because he made hard decisions that were unpopular--which is what a leader must do sometimes. The Bush record is a long string of inept decisions and obliviousness to their consequences. Harry Truman had a sign on his desk that said "The buck stops here." President Bush was not a leader, and his administration worked hard to shield him and its other members from being held accountable for their decisions (secret torture memos and so on).

But enough of the past, this election is about our future and the future of the world.

I heard man-on-the-street interviews with voters who said they were afraid that a President Obama would raise spending and taxes. President Bush has already raised spending, and a major cause of the ongoing financial crisis is that he misspent the money in ways that don't add to the productivity of our economy. This waste adds up to a couple of trillion dollars in lost opportunity. And Bush has already raised taxes because these vast sums of money were borrowed and have to be paid back.

So, President Obama inherits a colossal mess. If ever we need a leader, it is now, and I have confidence him. Wars, recession, world financial collapse, global warming, nuclear threats from rogue nations, the potential for pandemics. I know people are concerned about Obama's experience. This world is a different place from the one I grew up in. I respect John McCain's experience, but this is a different world from the one he grew up in, too. Yes, some old problems exist. Russia can--and does--behave like the old Soviet Union used to. But this is a new world, and Obama can see it in ways McCain can't. This is a world where Obama's leadership qualities, intelligence, and vision will serve us better than McCain's long view.

The age issue was important in the election, and as the baby boom generation ages we are seeing the passing of the torch. This is the first time I will be older than the president--Obama is at the very tail end of the baby boom, and I am one year older than him.

It's not easy to pass the torch. It's a little like the first time you go to a doctor who is younger than you. All your life older, wiser people were your doctor--and then there comes that day when, sitting naked in a flimsy paper smock, your life is in the hands of someone young enough that you might have told them to look both ways before crossing the street just a few years before.

For those of us old enough to vote--and older--the election of an African American to the presidency is an amazing development. Most transitions into the future are incremental, nearly unnoticed. Not this one. This is something new for us. We now live in a world in which ex-president Mandela sent a telegram of congratulations to President-Elect Obama. But for the little kids I saw holding their mothers' skirts at the polling station this morning, this is normal. By the way, those of you who could have voted in the past and simply never bothered to till today, you have had the power to make this change all along. It is perhaps President-Elect Obama's first act as a leader to have shown you this.

Don't ask me the question if you won't let me tell the truth and nothing but the truth

2008-10-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

OMAHA, Nebraska (TP) -- The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal involving a case in which a Nebraska judge banned anyone from saying "robbery" in a bank robbery trial.

Lawyers for the First National Bank had argued that Lancaster County District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront violated their client's constitutional rights by barring witnesses from using such words as "held at gunpoint" and "victim" during their testimony in the trial.

The judge said he banned the language because was concerned about the accused's right to a fair trial.

While restricting First National Bank's testimony, Cheuvront allowed attorneys for John Smith to use such words as "withdrawal" and "bank transaction" to describe the encounter between Smith and the bank.

The teller for the bank says Smith took money from her in October 2004 while she was too frightened by the handheld projectile acceleration device he was pointing at her to deny consent. Smith maintains the bank withdrawal was consensual.

The Associated Press usually does not identify accusers in bank robbery cases, but the First National Bank has allowed its name to be used publicly because of the issue over the judge's language restrictions.

Bank attorney Wendy Murphy said in an e-mail Monday that she was disappointed but not surprised by the high court's decision.

"The First National Bank and this case will forever be known as the beginning of reform on this important issue, because we laid the groundwork for the inevitable day when judges will stop making such ridiculous rulings," Murphy said.

A mistrial was declared in Smith's first trial in November 2006 when the jury deadlocked. The bank said afterward that the judge's ban had a negative effect on its teller's testimony, causing her to pause to ensure her words didn't violate the order.

Cheuvront declared a second mistrial in July 2007 during jury selection, citing news coverage and public protests on the bank's behalf.

The First National Bank sued Cheuvront over the language ban. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the bank failed to prove that he should intervene. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal, saying the federal court didn't have jurisdiction.

The case was listed Monday among those the Supreme Court declined to hear. Prosecutors previously said they decided not to pursue a third trial.

[With apologies to The Associated Press.]

Another fine mess

2008-09-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture of Congressman Laurel and Congressman Hardy. You might know them. They once tried to deliver a piano to a house and ended up destroying the house.

You might even be in their congressional district and voted for them.

You probably heard about Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson getting down on one knee and pleading with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He needed her. Clearly he picked a bad moment to leave his wife and propose to someone else's, but now is not the time to dwell on that. Let's leave their personal lives out of this for a moment and focus.

Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, certainly focused on the key issue when he said "This legislation is giving us a choice between bankrupting our children and bankrupting a few of these big financial institutions on Wall Street that made bad decisions." Yeah, who are these Wall Street fat cats anyway? I'm sure hauling sacks of money from one big financial institution to the next pays well--for them--but what about the rest of America?

We asked them for funding to keep credit from freezing up throughout this nation, and Congressman Laurel and Congressman Hardy took this as their cue to deliver a piano.

O.K., I don't understand it. The good news is we have nothing to fear, as is clearly evident on President Alfred E. Newman’s face.

Today's silver lining

2008-09-17T13:17:00.000-07:00

It was another slightly bad day on Wall St. today. Some people are calling today's 449 point drop the "second worst day of the year." But to me it is the second worst day of the week.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, professor at Columbia University and winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, offered some commonsense suggestions today for preventing another Wall St. crisis. I think he has a point.

However, if I may take a moment to reflect, it is at times like this that I think of the following words of The Yellow Emperor's Classic on Medicine:

treating a disease that has alredy developed . . . is like digging a well after you've become thirsty or making weapons after the battle is over.

So wrote Chinese scholars in the third millenium BCE.

This is true of so many things in life, but after all these thousands of years how many of us are wise enough to understand something this obvious? Or at least wise enough to ascertain which of our potential leaders might be wise enough to understand this and nominate financial regulators accordingly?

The premise of this movie . . .

2008-09-05T14:43:00.001-07:00

. . . is that a high-school graduate, state beauty queen, hockey mom rises from mayor of a town of 5,000 in Alaska to governor to president of the free world in the first 15 minutes--and then the high jinks begin. She would be vice president to the oldest U.S. president ever elected, see; and he drops off the scene in the first reel. I know it sounds farfetched, but it’s a comedy, not some realistic drama with high stakes. Think of it as a kind of King Ralph meets Baby Mama. I think Tina Fey for the lead, with Amy Poehler as co-writer with her. It’s a fun, heartwarming family film. Sarah, that’s the hockey mom who ends up as president, has five kids and a blue collar husband in tow. Let’s set this in Alaska--and then the action moves to Washington, D.C. Oh, it’s the usual stock characters:

There’s the husband, Todd, blue collar worker in the oil industry, snowmobiler, fisherman, beauty contest judge

There’s an ex-brother-in-law, age thirty-six, with three kids from four marriages, who uses a Taser on his 10-year-old stepson

There’s the pregnant teenage daughter and her hockey-playing aspiring redneck boyfriend

There’s the cranky neighbor and, well, you get the idea.

Now I know what you’re thinking. People in Alaska will feel picked on. They’ll say “Why don’t you pick on Alabama.” Or “Why don’t you pick on Staten Island.” Well, Alaska has a larger population than Staten Island. Besides, it wouldn’t make sense: Staten Island does not have a governor. Anyway, it’s a comedy. No one would believe these people are real. And, in the end, they have a heart of gold.

Making an Arguement for Misspelling

2008-08-18T12:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Laura Fitzpatrick,

I appreciate your article about Ken Smith, senior lecturer in criminology at Bucks New University, in Buckinghamshire, England, who finds so many spelling mistakes in his students' work that he proposes that several misspellings simply be accepted as variants. However, you may have missed a larger issue: Based on the picture accompanying your article, I think Mr. Smith's students are simply too young for university--let alone old enough to study criminology. These students haven't even learned cursive yet.

I think we push students far too hard nowadays. Really, now! At what age would we expect a budding criminologist to know how to spell "accidentally" or look it up in a dictionary? Not enough attention has been paid to the physiological effects on young arms being asked to open heavy boring books before they are ready--merely to find out how a word is spelled!?

Jack Bovill, chairman of the British-based Spelling Society, is certainly correct in saying that people who have trouble with spelling are punished when it comes to applying for jobs or even filling out forms. At a time like this we can hardly afford to see such people waste valuable education time learning how to put letters into arbitrary rows when there are so many bigger ideas to be learned about! I’d feel a lot better knowing that my physiologist concentrated on *physiology* rather than worry about not spelling it “fizzyollogee”! And what is this business with filling out forms, anyway! Is it just me or do we fill out way too many forms? What do they do with these forms? Where is the British-based Forms Society when you need them?

Libby's! Libby's! Libby's!

2008-08-12T12:54:00.000-07:00

After some nagging, I am relenting and putting up a blog post again. It’s not as if I haven’t had anything to say. I’ve been working seven days a week for the past 5 weeks and I am *really crabby*. And I have rants galore about store clerks, perps being chased by police, the network at my job, and so-called Communists in China that I just haven’t had time to commit to cyberspace. Perhaps if I had been exiled at the beach, I’d have had time to write about all this. Instead I will take a moment to note an absurdity that took place today (one of oh so many).

The Court of Appeals in Washington has upheld the dismissal of Valarie Plame’s lawsuit against Vice President Cheney et al. for destroying her career. As you probably know, it is not illegal for a journalist to reveal the identity of a spy and put her and her contacts at risk and destroy her career and perhaps put you and me as citizens of this country at more risk than we would otherwise face. Revealing the identities of those who have been trained at taxpayers' expense and who put their lives on the line protecting this nation and, indeed, defend the world from grave danger is what patriotic journalists are supposed to do and that is why we admire them so much.

It is, however, illegal for a U.S. government official to reveal the name of a U.S. spy (thus one of the bases for the lawsuit against Vice President Cheney et al.). In the original dismissal of Plame’s suit the judge said, essentially, that Vice President Cheney et al.’s desire for revenge against her was understandable. The latest dismissal upheld that decision, saying that even though revealing Plame’s identity might be illegal, it is within the scope of, say, Vice President Cheney’s official duties. Or Vice President Père Ubu or whatever his name is. Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle wrote in his opinion, "The conduct, then, was in the defendants' scope of employment regardless of whether it was unlawful or contrary to the national security of the United States." Well, who can argue with that?

Now, I’m not a lawyer, and I’m sure Judge David Sentelle writes fantastic opinions every day. In fact, I am just too lazy to read through this thing, which in all likelihood I am incapable of understanding anyway. What I don’t get is why Cheney's top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. Wasn’t that within Libby’s scope of employment regardless of whether it was unlawful or contrary to the national security of the United States in his important work for Vice President Ubu Enchaîné?

How to be a billionaire

2008-07-03T13:23:00.001-07:00

$2,110,100 wins lunch with Warren Buffett

Dear Cute Little Girl,

First of all, for the $2,110,100 you could have gone to a better place than the Dairy Queen for your lunch with Mr. Buffett. But kudos on your winning bid, and I hope you made Mr. Buffett explain to you how he became a billionaire. As a Girl Scout with several merit badges and the gumption to do enough after-school chores to raise $2,110,100, I think it's a safe bet that you'll go far.

Put it in your mouth

2008-06-26T08:52:00.000-07:00

Now that so many Korean groceries are being displaced by upscale stores and gentrification, not to mention demolition of old buildings to make way for new ones, there is only *ONE* store that I know of that sells ika shiokara here in New York. (I checked the Japanese sections of several grocery stores in Chinatown--where I didn't see *any* shishamo, although I did find a few brands of nattō.)

So, I need to take the somewhat out-of-my-way subway ride to the Upper East Side to Katagiri. When I double-checked their address on their Web site, I saw that they have been in the same location for 101 years!
I am just so grateful that in this city that is constantly tearing itself apart some continuity somehow survives.

And the tip-off was . . .

2008-06-25T11:42:00.001-07:00

. . . the annoying tune it played as it drove down the street.

Police Bust South Beach 'Brothel On Wheels'

. . . doodly doot dee-doo dee-doo, doo-dee doo-dee dee-doo etc.

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Tits

2008-06-22T09:48:00.000-07:00

The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, "You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done."

100 points!

2008-06-19T11:13:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine has written a new, fun book about the state of wine today. It was reviewed by Forbes recently, and you have got to love Robert Parker's reaction: "It's disgraceful. I'm not going to comment on the book or read it." Or, at least, I admire his reaction--so much internal absurdity in so few words. I don't know whether to think of it as a case of "Criticize Things You Don't Know About" or "Guitar Groups Are On The Way Out"--although I guess, properly, I should appreciate Mr. Parker's comment for it's own perfection, but I'm afraind I can only give it 94 Powell Points.

And I give Alice Feiring 100 Powell Points!

Aw, what the heck, Parker deserve the full 100 Powell Points for his quote. And I'm going to give myself 100 Powell Points for this blog post.

Yay! Everyone deserves 100 Powell Points!

It Can Happen to the Best of Us Dept.

2008-06-17T11:40:00.000-07:00

I, unfortunately, have been to too many disasters as president.--President Bush, today

I know what you mean, President Bush; boy, do I know what you mean.

Lie #45 - somehow that . . .

2008-05-09T11:45:00.000-07:00

. . . "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" defense never works as well as one might hope. I would almost say it isn't worth a decanter of warm piss.

Lie #44 - your in town

2008-05-08T10:40:00.000-07:00

Vice President John Nance Garner once said that the vice presidency "isn't worth a pitcher of warm piss." Others believe he said "isn't worth a bucket of warm piss." Still others have quoted him as saying "a warm bucket of piss."

Not to digress, but I like to think that this Oscar Wilde of warm piss partial quotations used "bucket." This is because if you're like me you hate to think what would happen if you--or any cabinet member--walked into the cabinet room at the White House and saw an inviting pitcher on the table, you would not hesitate to pour yourself a nice glass of lemonade. This wouldn't happen if you saw, say, a galvanized steel bucket sitting on that well-polished mahogany table--you would assume that that was a bucket of warm piss.

Now to my point. John Nance Garner said this during The Great Depression, a time when the price of warm piss had fallen to all-time lows, not even a penny a pitcher--in fact the pitcher was worth more. But do you know what you would have today if you started with $5,000 worth of warm piss and let it compound for 200 years?

Need a shot of Southern Comfort while you think about it?

Five thousand dollars isn't a lot of money today, but stop and perform the caluclation: How does $20 million sound! You can buy a lot of pitchers of warm piss with that kind of money.

Why not start today?

The idea of compound interest is simplicity itself.

Lie #43 - Stoner is the state

2008-05-07T13:44:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you saw the news story in Georgia that began thusly:

ATLANTA -- Georgia retailers soon will be banned from selling candy flavored to taste like marijuana to children.
Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue signed a measure into law Wednesday that bans the sale of "marijuana flavored products" to minors -- anyone under 18 -- and calls for a fine of up to $500 for each offense.
The measure takes effect July 1st.
It targets businesses that sell the candies with drug-inspired names such as "Kronic Kandy" and "Pot Suckers."
The law says the candies promote drug use.
Senator Doug Stoner pushed the bill in the senate. "I don't think that folks are aware--

Now hold on a minute. Senator Stoner? So, I called him up.

"You've really come up in the world since we last spoke," told him.

"Ah, well," he said humbly.

Wearing my cool t-shirt, I went over to his house and we put on the CD of "Where There's Smoke There's Cheech and Chong."

There certainly is.

Lie #36 - Alice Dee

2008-04-30T11:10:00.000-07:00

LSD is dangerous! Do you hear me! This guy took it, and he DIED! Need I say more?

Lie #34 - for godssakes, people . . .

2008-04-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

. . . don't miss out on your chance to get this t-shirt!

Lie #30 - i'll be the judge of that

2008-04-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

Jack Cafferty couldn't possibly have insulted 1,300,000,000 Chinese people. Yes, he told the truth and, apparently, the lawsuit is not disputing his statement that the United States imported Chinese-made "junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food." Cafferty went on to opine that "They're basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years."

Anyway, how could 1,300,000,000 Chinese people claim to be insulted when none of them have seen Jack Cafferty or, for that matter, any independent press?

Lie #19 - Mr. Popular

2008-04-13T08:40:00.000-07:00

I have now succeeded in installing a statistical counter on this blog. I sort of wish I didn’t. Here’s what I have found out. First of all, my theory that only six people read this blog is correct. Unfortunately, my theory that those six people are my friends is wrong. I don’t know where my so-called friends are these days. Most (i.e. five) of my readers are outside the United States.

Far and away, the most popular page (drum roll here, please, John Densmore) is this one. C’mon, people. What is wrong with you?! Then again, I speak as someone who visited Jim Morrison’s grave twice last year, once in springtime and once in fall. O.K., if I could have, I would have visited four times--there are four seasons, after all, and why wouldn’t people visit Paris four times a year? Well, lack of money, for one thing. Please send me money via PayPal and I will visit Paris on your behalf. If you make this possible for me, I will be able to describe the great food they have, that wonderful Off Off Off Off Broadway theatre they have, the museums, I will visit Jim Morrison’s grave and give him your regards, and if worse comes to worse, I will sit a cafés all over the city, restricting myself parsimoniously to a pain au chocolat and café crème while I brush up my French, and hang out with glamorous people.

Of course there has been a lot on my mind lately. Finally there’s an easy way to follow the DASH diet, it’s called the cookie diet. That cookie diet sounded so great, but have you tried those cookies? They’re made of bran and sardines. You can imagine how scrumptious it was sneaking pinches of that cookie dough into my mouth and licking my fingers, but once those cookies are baked, they’re not that great.

I don’t know about you, but I have been following the CMT Awards and the CMA Awards. I have just tried the new Child Perfume. It’s great, not at all like the unchanged diaper scent I expected. Herschel Walker has been helping me with my tax extension form. And Rob Lowe’s nanny has been helping me find the IRS address. On a sad note, Hazel Court has passed away--but not before bringing a Form 4868 to me and Herschel Walker as we sat with our pain au chocolat and café crème at a sidewalk table at a café on the Upper East Side puzzling over that darn tax extension form. But I will say this, man is Herschel Walker smart. Smarter than me, certainly. I just feel bad that Hazel Court looked perfectly healthy this morning. Herschel and I were shocked when we heard the news. Anyway, thanks to her, I got my IRS extension done. Now, if only I could find that Internal Revenue Service address. I went on the Web and all I’ve found so far is Nutella’s address.

Lie #18 - cool out

2008-04-12T07:30:00.000-07:00

Today I solved the Mideast Crisis. Now, now, stop it. It's not what your thinking. Why anyone gets turned on by the Mideast Crisis I have no idea. Such people are aberrant at best. I mean, you could get turned on by sheet rubber, if you know what I mean; or this Marilyn Monroe video, which you can see at the following link. Siobhan Bonnouvrier is hot, if only for her name, never mind what she did with that cougar in Chicago with Todd McShay after ther ACL Festival, on tax day no less--in the back of the Pope mobile. But I digress.

My point is that having discovered a magic phrase. (No, is it not “ponder the monder” or “ponder the maunder,” and it has nothing to do with Maundy money.) Anyway, I went to the Mideast, and you should have seen the place. I mean, rockets and bombs and bullets flying around. I shouted, "Yo! PEOPLE! Cool it." And they did.

So, mission accomplished, I came back to the Unites States and had brunch on the Upper East Side, like I always do. You know where to find me, Nobel Committee, and if you have mislaid my address, you can always call the people at the Able Prize or Norwegian Pickled Herring Institute.

Lie #17 - yo!

2008-04-11T08:56:00.000-07:00

It was Friday night and it had been a full day since we'd had a party at our frat house. (I just haven't had time to report them all here, although I'd have to say that if you've been to one frat house party, you've been to them all.)

At Chad's suggestion I brought a case of rum again, which was much appreciated. I had to make a second trip to get a keg. Somehow I seem to be the only person bringing drinks for everyone. And still no girl for me. There actually is a sorority with my equivalent; however, the equivalent of a creepy old guy who should have left college life behind years ago is not a creepy old gal etc. (which would have been an improvement over my dates lately)--it's a crotchety eccentric bizarre old lady who shows up in clothes that smell like mothballs and slips an entire paper plate of nachos into her tremendously large old-lady purse, buttonholes any spare person (O.K., just me), and rails against gentrification for 25 minutes with her nacho and halitosis breath, and mercifully leaves because she doesn't want to miss a rerun of "Petticoat Junction."

My philosophical conclusion? Even though I don't have halitosis or wear a sweater in serious need of de-balling (and she could shave her upper lip while she's at it), the way she appears to me is the way I appear to the sorority girls.

I guess the reason why a particular frat party is like no other falls to which combination of misdemenors (or worse) are committed and what gets destroyed.

This party started to get out of hand by about 2:45 (a.m.). Four guys quite spontaneously insisted on demonstrating wrestling moves and a chair overturned, knocking over a lamp, which shattered, prompting someone to throw the empty keg through the window. People were shouting and laughing. And then I shouted, "Yo! PEOPLE! Cool it."

And they did! I should add that I am not a yo-sayer. In fact, that was the first time I said "yo" in my whole life. But everyone calmed down, righted the furniture, took out their wallets to pay for the damage, and at a decent hour the guests went home.

Lie #16 - Lola

2008-04-10T08:48:00.000-07:00

I, um, made out with a Julianne Moore-lookalike drag queen. And our second date had started out so well, until-- Don't tell anyone this happened. Sometimes you can't go back in time and undo history. I'll just try to focus on the positive side of this experience.

Lie #15 - more hopelessness

2008-04-09T08:44:00.000-07:00

This is the worst news story in Africa.*

*Go ahead, call me a liar.

Lie #14 - the ladies man

2008-04-08T11:47:00.000-07:00

I felt pretty dejected after last night's party at the ΔΙΚ House. I went to a bar tonight to cheer myself up with alcohol, and you'll never guess what ended up happening: I made out with Julianne Moore.

I know what you're thinking, she's married and has kids and what would she be doing hanging out in a dank bar on a Tuesday night? But, hey, I'm the guy who discovered a planet that nobody else could find, which I am now thinking I should have named Julianne Moore instead of GJ 43c.

If you must know, Julianne Moore is much better looking in person than in the movies--and she's a better kisser.

Lie #13 - party hearty

2008-04-07T11:23:00.000-07:00

Chad said I was the coolest guy in the frat house and that we should celebrate my astronomical discovery. So we did what they apparently do every Monday night: I brought a case of rum and we got drunk and partied till 4 a.m. This was the first time was I attended a frat party.

All the frat brothers were there, of course. There was Chad, the good-natured, mesomorphic, all-American in a general sort of way. There was the studious nerd. And the somewhat aphasic athlete, who turns out actually does play football (he was the guy who ate the banana I didn't). There was me--the creepy older guy who should have left college years ago. And a whole bunch of other guys, including the good-looking studley athlete (not sure what sport) with a girl on each arm.

I looked around and I noticed that I was the only guy without a girl. I'm all for the two-girls-for-every-boy policy, but only if I'm one of the boys. I really thought that after literally being hazed to join this frat there would be some kind of benefit--at a party held in my honor no less. Even the wimpy nerd guy met a nice girl (with thick glasses etc., but I'd say she was librarian hot).

I asked Chad about this. "How come girls walk in and start making out with guys they don't even know.

"Because colleges are institutions of higher learning," Chad said, lifting a rum and Coke to his lips.

"They're making out with every guy except me," I said. "And some guy have two girls."

"You're the creepy old guy who should have left college years ago. No college girl is going to make out with you."

Lie #12 - small world

2008-04-06T11:08:00.000-07:00

I discovered the smallest planet outside the solar system. As you know, the universe is 20,000,000,000 years old and it is about 115,000,000,000 light years across. Our galaxy contains about 200,000,000,000 stars; so, you can imagine how it took me practically all day to find this planet. Here is an artist's rendering of it:

Because of its eccentric shape it has a wobbly orbit, which made it easier than usual to find. The planet, which I have named GJ 436c, orbits a red dwarf in leo about 30 light years from here. Its days are four years long, although the planet is so small that a year there is barely an afternoon here. The planet is populated by Native American dwarves, who spend most of their time moving their clocks forward and backward because of the constant change due to daylight savings time.

To indicate just how small the planet is, in the artist's rendering above a bowling ball has been added on the left to give you a sense of the scale.

Lie #11 - brown haze

2008-04-05T08:54:00.000-07:00

Today I got hazed. The guys at Delta Iota Kappa said it was just a formality, because of my street cred. It turned out I wasn't the only pledge. The house had an opening for the rôle of creepy old guy who should have been done with college life years ago.

Anyway, they had me and Arthur each sit at a table in the kitchen coating a banana, skin and all, with peanut butter. They took away Arthur and his banana first. About 15 minutes later they came for me--I noticed Arthur in the hallway with his shirtsleeves all wet. They took me to the bathroom.

"Put your banana in the toilet," Chad said--he's the president of the ΔΙΚ house.

So, I did what he asked.

"Now, take it out and peel it and eat it," he said. About a dozen other frat guys were standing around and laughing.

"No," I said.

"Do you want to join our frat or not?" Chad said.

"I don't care," I said.

"O.K., you're in," said Chad. "You passed the hazing. If you ate that banana, we definitely wouldn't have let you in."

So, I'm a member in good standing of a fraternity!

"What about Arthur?" I said.

"He won't be joining us," said one of the frat brothers.

As I walked down the hall to the TV room they filled me in a bit more.

"Actually whether eating the banana or not is passing the test is determined at random by tossing a coin. This way, if anyone finds out about our hazing tactics, they won't know how to ace the test."

I looked behind me down the hallway and I noticed a large football-player-looking guy getting peanut butter all over his hands as he peeled and ate my banana.

"Don't pay any atttention to him," Chad said. "Can you help us carry these two couches out into the street?"

"You're throwing them away? They look new."

"Don't ask," said Chad.

Lie #10 - damn lies

2008-04-04T08:38:00.000-07:00

Today I told a lie. O.K., that's not true; in fact I did not lie at all today. Um, so I guess that part about me telling a lie isn't true. Now look what you made me do! I wouldn't have told any lies at all until you made me lie about lying. This is all your fault. I think we need to put Chelsea Clinton on the spot and demand that she explain all this! If you can't stand the heat stay out of the kitchen. If somebody runs for president, do they think they're someone special? Who is this so-called "Monica Lewinsky," anyway! We need to give Kenneth Starr another $40,000,000 so he can investigate Whitewater, Kenneth Foster's "suicide," and the blue dress. Since all this inflation, that might now cost $80,000,000--but every penny would be well spent if we can at last find the truth! Bill Clinton needs to be impeached again--otherwise we will never be able to put these questions to rest once and for all! And if impeaching him twice doesn't do it, I say impeach him again!! There hasn't been anywhere near enough impeaching around here lately!

Lie #9 - Delta Iota Kappa

2008-04-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

Running around naked in Times Square in the rain just keeps on paying dividends. Today one of my blog readers called me and asked whether I’d like to join his fraternity. He explained that what I did on Monday was the sort of thing they strongly encouraged and that I would make an excellent member--after a suitable hazing, of course.

I explained that I was long out of school and, in fact, was an important businessman in the imported Norwegian canned pickled herring industry (not to mention my experience in building demolition--which I did mention and which led to a confusing conversation in which I had to explain that I did not “build a demolition” (there’s no such thing as that), rather I demolished-- Oh, never mind, in the end neither of us knew what I was talking about).

Anyway, the young man went on to explain that one of their fraternity brothers had died of old age and they were looking for someone to take his place as the creepy guy who was way to old for college and was I interested?

“Was he one of those guys who goes back to get their degree at age 80 because World War II interrupted their studies?” I asked.

“No, nothing like that,” said the young man. “It had to do with the terms of his grandfather’s will.”

Apparently, the guy would get his inheritance in monthly checks “as long as he stayed in college.” The grandfather probably meant that he would get the money if he stuck out college and graduated. It’s too bad the grandfather didn’t hire a lawyer and do better job of drafting the terms of that will. It’s too bad the guy didn’t study law while he was in college for 60 years, because he might have been able the get the darn will interpreted a different way.

“So,” said the young man. “Are you ready to join the men who’ve joined the ΔΙΚs?”

“I sure am!” I said.

Wow! I’ve been asked to join a fraternity!

Lie #8 - pants

2008-04-02T10:28:00.000-07:00

I forgot to mention that after the Times Square debacle on Monday, I caught the subway downtown to go back to my office. I've got to say I was pretty much in the dumps besides feeling chilly. I ran into, of all people, Charlie Todd, who took one look at me and told me to put some pants on. Little did I know that at that moment I started a revolution. Charlie told me he was declaring March 31st National For Godsakes Put On Your Pants Day.

Lie #7 - fool

2008-04-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

So, I pulled off an April Fool's prank you wouldn't believe today. Here's the setup: I had a bouquet of spring flowers delivered to my secretary first thing in the morning. Then I gave her a card saying that I appreciated all the work she has done for me this year and inside was a gift certificate for a half day at a spa and a dinner for two for her and her husband. You should've seen the look on her face!! Haw! Haw! Haw! She sure wasn't expecting that! I'm still laughing about it.

Lie #6 - there's no place like home

2008-03-31T14:07:00.000-07:00

So happy to be back in America that I ran naked through the rain today. In Times Square. I was hoping to get arrested, but I was a little disappointed about that not happening. In fact, cops were just saying "Move along folks. There's nothing to see here." And, unfortunately, there wasn't much of a crowd either. Even though it was lunchtime, most people were paying attention to the Naked Cowboy.

All I can say is if M&Ms steals my idea--running around actually naked instead of in underwear and with a guitar and boots--I'll sue!

Lie #5 - first ladies

2008-03-31T13:47:00.000-07:00

I spent much of the day on the streets of Paris selling Norwegian pickeled herring. Although I cornered the market recently, it is not selling as rapidly or for as high a price as I expected.

While I was out on Rue Montainge who should come up to me all smiles, but The First Lady of France, herself. I met Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. Most people don't know that she is a math genius. She told me she was very impressed that I had won the Abel Prize.

I have to admit that I was a bit intimidated to meet this impressive woman in a grand fur coat surroudned by her security detail. When I explained to her what I was doing, she bought a can of pickeled herring from me. She didn't have euros on her--and I don't take credit cards. But fishing thrugh the pockets of her coat she found two Norwegian crowns; so, I sold her a tin of the herring.

Carla told me she had just got back from London, and the subject of the photograph of her that Christies is auctioning off came up.

I told her not to worry about that and to feel free to come to America anytime. We got over being prudes decades ago. In fact, we got over all of that stuff back when Eleanor Roosevelt posed for a photograph.

Although she was a great humanitarian and progressive thinker on human rights, a lot of people don't know that Eleanor Roosevelt was practically crippled with embarrassment about how pigeontoed-toed she was. She didn't want people to see her walk; so, she usually got pushed around in a wheelchair by her husband, which was quite difficult for him to do as he himself was in a wheelchair.

Lie #4 - math prize

2008-03-29T13:33:00.000-07:00

I was awarded 6 million crowns by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for my pioneering work with Tits. Now, now, stop it. It's not what your thinking. Why anyone gets turned on by little birds I have no idea. Such people are aberrant at best.

I am talking, of course, about my work regarding the new and influential notion of groups as geometric objects and their symmetry that I did with Jacques Tits, of France.

By the way, the Norwegian crown is a lot stronger than the dollar; so, it didn't make sense to convert all the money to--gulp--American dollars. That's why I spent my half of the $1.2 million on Norwegian pickeled herring. They don't call me an algebra whiz for nothing!

Lie #3 - There's gonna be a rumble

2008-03-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

I blew up buildings in France. No, no, it’s not what you’re thinking. I’m not a terrorist. I was working with a demolition crew that had to clear some run-down apartment blocks from the 1950s to make room for something new and nifty.

By the way, the French don’t implode structures with dynamite the way we do in America. They have a kind of hydraulic jacking device that lifts one side of a building and can actually turn it upside down. It’s a lot quieter than the way we do it, and a lot less noisy.

The last structure that had to be destroyed was the house that the crew was staying in during the project flipped just fine, but it was too light to self-crush like the apartment buildings we did. So, the demolition company sold it to a guy who shipped it to the Kaszuby area, by the Baltic sea, in northern Poland.

Interestingly, everyone I have met on this project speaks fluent English, with an American accent, which makes my attempts with my phrasebook sound quite pitiful.

Lie #2 - raison d'être

2008-03-27T10:20:00.000-07:00

Every day for a year I will come up with a new premise for a blog about doing something every day for a year.

[Message to Puerto Rican Governor Anibal Acevedo Vila: Don't make false statements. Lie! Plenty of people have gotten the book thrown at them for making false statements, but nobody has ever gotten into legal trouble for lying. I envy you having 12 associates, by the way, I have to write this whole blog myself.]

LIES! - Lie #1 - if I did it

2008-03-26T11:37:00.000-07:00

This is a blog; so, I might as well write something--which I have not done often enough (or have done too often in some people's opinion).

Now that yet another hot blog seems to have wound down, I feel like I should try to do something. So, every day for a year I will tell a lie.* I know that doesn't sound very positive or particularly impressive, but I'm trying to get in touch with my inner Cretan (that's a lie, by the way). Anyway, I can't help thinking that if more people lied, we would get better at separating truth from fiction. And Lord knows there isn't enough fiction in this world.

So, here goes: Today I ate a lemon, skin and all. Swallowed it whole.

*This itself might be a lie.

In search of lost comedy

2008-03-25T14:38:00.000-07:00

For some reason I found myself thinking of Perfect Strangers today. A little bored with my work, I headed for the Web and stumbled upon the random fact that today is the 22nd anniversary of the show's debut. The show ran until 1993 and thus accumulated more than the traditional 5 years of episodes needed for syndication.

When Perfect Strangers debuted, I was a newlywed. I think my wife found it first, probably by accident while changing channels, and Balki Bartokomous's jumbled English is what caught her attention--possibly because it took her a minute or so to determine whether it was grammatically and idiomatically proper. She was a foreigner and she jumbled her English now and then, too--but she was fluent enough to get the jokes.

During the run of the show, 1986 to 1993, my wife and I lived in four apartments, changed jobs, changed careers, bought a cat. Perfect Strangers was one of those great shows that nevertheless by the time it ended you had almost forgotten it was still on the air. That wasn't really the show's fault, it's just that by 1993 we were working too hard and not watching much television. Now we're divorced, but I still have the cat.

It's easy to forget how great the physical comedy was; something that is way more difficult to pull off than most people realize. I remembered how good Mark-Linn Baker was when I saw an episode of "Hangin' with Mr. Cooper" that he directed that climaxed in a side-plitting scene involving Mark Curry smashing up a lot of glass with a golf club--there are about a million ways to do that and not be funny.

Speaking of the end of an era, tomorrow, Wednesday, March 26th, is the 366th--and thus last--new thing.

My fellow New Yorkers . . .

2008-03-10T13:10:00.001-07:00

. . . Here is a picture of me:
I've had kind of a bad day, and I don't want to talk about it much.

Here is a picture of my wife:
She's pretty good looking actually, except this is a picture of her when she's thrilled to see me.

Somehow when I prepared myself for a career in public service, I expected it to be more like this:
It hasn't worked out like that as much as I'd hoped. C'mon people, cut me some slack. If I want to have a good time, it costs me $5,500 an hour. Do you know how long it takes me to get $5,500? On a government salary? A lot longer than an hour, let me tell you. Do you think you could lighten up once in a while and be a little more forgiving? Now let's pull ourselves together and focus on what's really important: the bond insurance industry.

The coward bastard bomber

2008-03-06T11:18:00.000-08:00

When I heard early this morning about the bomb attack on the military recruitment station in Times Square, I immediately thought of two previous similar attacks. (The police aren’t explicitly making that connection, however.)

Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but I believe these attacks are all the work of the same man: The Coward Bastard Bomber. Why did I even remember these attacks in October and May of 2005? Because they were weirdly petty. Early one morning in May of 2005 a “novelty bomb,” as the police are calling them, exploded near the British consulate. In October of 2005 there was another, near the Mexican consulate, shattering windows. We remember, Coward Bastard, wherever you are, we remember.

Mayor Bloomberg went to Times Square today and spoke about the situation, calling the bomber a coward: "Whoever the coward was that committed this disgraceful act on our city will be found and prosecuted to the full extent of the law," Bloomberg said. Mayor Bloomberg forgot to add “bastard”--well, he didn’t forget, it’s just that the Mayor tends not to say “bastard” in front of TV cameras and on the radio. For one thing, it’s undignified, even if it’s true. I, however, have no reservations about saying "Whoever the coward bastard was that committed this disgraceful act, he is a coward and a bastard.”

What is the Coward Bastard Bomber against? Mexicans? The British? Windows? Small buildings? He did break a couple of windows at 3:45 this morning, although apparently the “Uncle Sam Wants You” poster behind the window was unscathed. Clearly this attack is more bastardly than dastardly. The U.S. military just spent $60,000,000 to practice shooting down a satellite (they succeeded); so, you know an ammunition container filled with gunpowder (or pineapple or apple, as in the earlier incidents) could no doubt bring the Pentagon to its knees. I have news for you, Coward Bastard Bomber.

Yes, somebody could have got hurt, most likely the Coward Bastard Bomber himself, which is a typical fate for cowards and bastards who make bombs and carry them around on bicycles.

I don’t know whether these attacks qualify as felonies, but I suspect they do. And I can’t remember whether all that fuss about the three-strikes-and-you’re-out law finally resulted in New York having that law, the one where if you're convicted of committing three felonies you can never get out of prison. I hope we have that law, and I envision this conversation:

“What’re youse in for?” [This is New York, of course.]
“Bombings!”
“Say . . . Aren’t you the Coward Bastard Bomber?”
“I . . . uh . . . don’ think of myself that way.”
“You put gunpowder into a plastic pineapple and broke windows at 3 a.m.”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re in the pen for the duration? Wow, I have actually met the Coward Bastard Bomber.”

When are . . .

2008-03-05T13:42:00.000-08:00

. . . people going to learn to stop stealing?

Bai Ling on her way to the airport:

Bai Ling one hour later being booked on suspicion of stealing $16.22 worth of batteries and magazines from a store at the airport:

Need I say more? Pay for your batteries and magazines. Don't disturb the peace.*

*Note to Bai Ling: If you'd just asked me, I would have bought the batteries and magazines for you and none of this would have happened. Stop being so shy and call me. Disturbing the peace does not pay.

Waiting for Garfield

2008-02-27T09:58:00.001-08:00

O.K., I'm sold on the Garfield minus Garfield phenomenon.

So, what does it mean that removing the cat from "Garfield," one of the most popular cartoon strips in the world, tranforms it into something utterly avant garde, perhaps even something profound?

Burlesque and you

2008-01-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

If you are like me--and there is a 25% chance that you are me, because only about four people read this blog--then you are aware of the renaissance in burlesque that has left New York dizzy with visions of tassle-whirling pasties and--like me--you have neglected for far too long to see what all the excitement is about. Anyway, tonight I caught the This Is Burlesque show at Corio.

Upstairs at Corio is a lot like a comfortable living room, the furniture being a mix of quaint, old-fashioned mid-century modern and quaint old-fashioned post modernism. It is a safe place, and I felt comfortable.

I should say that burlesque is not stripping for fat chicks, as a friend of mine has characterized it; for one thing, the women are in pretty good shape. At the risk of giving away what goes on at a burlesque show, let me say right here that I am not going to say whether any of these gorgeous women end up in less that their G-strings and pasties or confirm or deny that a Ping-Pong ball hit me in the forehead.

I will say that in looking over the menu I wondered whether the food at a burlesque show is “food.” The answer is that the scallops I had were great. Take away Angie Pontani and her sisters and you would still have a restaurant that served a delicious meal with large portions, as a friend of mine has already mentioned.

But eating great scallops in winter would be so much less of an experience without Murray Hill presiding. My friend, a theatre major, said to me “If they break down the fourth wall, I’m out of here.” I told her I thought the fourth wall had already dissolved, that the domestic arrangement of couches and chairs formed a continuum with the stage. . . . Murray Hill, who has a kind of Benny Hill-like cherubic face and began with a song containing the line “I like chicks!,” describes himself as the “hardest working middle-aged man in show business.” Never before has the smarminess and the seamy side of show business been so adorable. As he worked the room, commenting on members of the audience with the kind of laser-accurate insights that we would hope our therapists would have, I told my friend that I thought part of what burlesque does is push the envelope rather like the way fire departments out west set controlled brushfires. “You overintellectualizing,” my friend said.

I just wish that someday I could learn to underintellectualize. I probably should not have turned down the free vodka shot.

In due course Murray Hill set his sites on us: “What? Have you been going out for five years or something?” Yes, I laughed. Having been in a five-year-plus relationship that went thud I knew only too well that that is what I certainly must have looked like with my 26-year-old female friend (platonic, for real).

It has been a long time since I had seen such a parade of stockings and straps and bustiers. I suddenly found myself with a memory from when I was very young, probably too young for nursery school and watching my mother get dressed--I am old enough to know a time when girdles and stockings held up with snaps and straps were the normal innerwear of most women.

The highlight of the show for me was Melody Sweets, who approached the stage from the back of the room. She leaned down to me and said “Where are your drinks?” (they hadn’t arrived yet). She then went into an endearing version of Tom Waits’ “The Piano Has Been Drinking.” And so there is that glamour, the dizzy lyrics she sung sweetly (she did another nice song at the end of the show), and I am left reminding myself that “Melody Sweets actually spoke to me! I will never wash my ear again!”

Sorry about that . . .

2008-01-15T13:17:00.001-08:00

. . . previous post. You need to cleanse your palate with something pretty. That whole truck thing-- I'm starting to put together a theory that America is not classy.

For Some Reason . . .

2008-01-15T12:48:00.001-08:00

. . . I am always the last to know about these sorts of things.

Here is a picture . . .

2007-12-31T11:00:00.000-08:00

. . . of a lady who looks very pretty:

Here is an article about a list she published in a book that will scare you shitless.

In case anyone is . . .

2007-12-27T12:44:00.000-08:00

. . . still arguing the opposite, let me put in my two cents: The terrorists are cowards.

Deutsch fürs Gespräch

2007-11-29T13:00:00.000-08:00

There are only eight hours of daylight in Berlin this time of year. The sun sets at about 4:15 and it is as dark as midnight by about 4:30. I got out to Charlottenburg relatively early this morning, not to do anything touristy, but to check out a couple of book stores. I came up from the Earnst-Reuter-Platz U-Bahn station and headed for Knesebeckstraße--and it was then that I learned that the stores opened at 10 a.m., not 9.

Not a problem. I bought postcards and headed for the post office, which was not only open but rather busy. Post offices in Germany are more civilized than their U.S. counterparts. German post offices also function as banks for a lot of people. Anyway, I sat down at a desk and wrote my postcards. (U.S. post offices don't have chairs.) By the time I handed my postcards to the lady it was nearly 10. I didn't see a place to get a snack in the area; so, I went straight to the bookstores.

One of the things I like to do when I travel in non-English-speaking countries is buy their books on learning English. I use them in reverse, and I happened to find three good ones this morning. The resources for Germans learning English are far greater than our resources for learning German. (And the French have greater resources for learning English than we have for learning French.) So, once you have a foundation in grammar and vocabulary, if you want to learn German, get those books that Germans use.

At Knesebeck Elf I bought Englisch ganz leicht. Wortschatz, which was only €5, and Große Lerngrammatik, Englisch, by the same publisher. My favorite, though, is Englisch fürs Gespräch, which is not only a wealth of things we say all the time in English, it is also a convenient pocket size. When I go on to Amzon.de, I see these books' siblings, which I did not see in the stores I went to. I suppose I'll buy them online at some point. I did not buy any audio books today. At Marga Schoeller I bought a few other books, German translations of books I know in English (which means I can use the English version as a crutch as I try to improve my reading). I was surprised that I did not see any of the dual-language books published by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. I have bought several of those on eBay, and I suppose that's where I will continue to find them. If you want to learn to read German, buy these books (and other dual-language books by other German publishers). To repeat: The German resources totally blow away our resources.

I dropped my sack of books off at my hotel and headed out to another neighborhood to check out its used bookstores. I changed trains at Alexanderplatz. Since you asked, the answer to your question is yes, you can buy a copy of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz in the bookstore in the Alexanderplatz station--however, that is a very long book that is waaaay over my head. Instead, I bought a Leberkäse im Brötchen.

Leberkäse is pink meat that is the approximate size and shape of loaves of bread and it sits under the glass in hot steel pans waiting to get sliced up and served between two halves of a roll. The man at the Leberkäse stand in the big train station, in his tattoos and leather, with a lean, hard face, looked like he would rather beat me up than sell me a sandwich. But when I asked him (in German), he was very polite. He took out a big knife and sliced a slab of meat for me. When I didn't understand his question about the mustard, he switched to English--my semi-useless American phrasebook had not prepared me to be asked whether I want sweet or hot mustard. I also ordered a Heineken. A Leberkäse im Brötchen is about the size of a hamburger.

The meal was delicious! Leberkäse is similar to what we think of as hot dog meat, although it is lighter and less salty than a hot dog, and it has a mild taste that I enjoyed. By the way, you can buy beer in Berlin the way we can buy, say, Coca-Cola, and you're allowed to drink it in the street without that beloved American charade of hiding it in a small brown paper bag. When I finished off my brunch, I handed the empty Heineken bottle back to the leader of the pack behind the counter, and he politely thanked me. With a light lunchtime beer buzz I headed through the tunnels of Alexanderplatz to find the U-Bahn that would take me to a neighborhood that had a used-book store.

ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ

2007-11-26T11:00:00.000-08:00

I first heard about Père Lachaise years ago, in college, while reading an article in Rolling Stone that mentioned that Jim Morrison is buried there. I was curious about this vast necropolis, but I never got to visit it until the spring of this year. I was there again today. I did not visit Marcel Proust again this time.

We got to the gate before 9 a.m. The light was beautiful and almost no one was there except a few workmen tending graves and a couple of guys who wandered in the same direction as us to see you know who, which is where we went to first--my friend wanted to see this famous tomb and we had a plane to catch.

I first visited Paris when I was 12, and after college I went four or five more times, but it was only this year that I traveled with people whose idea of Paris was similar to mine and who were inclined to explore it accordingly.

I have spent so many years not traveling that I devoted too much of 2007 to making up for lost time this year. I went to Europe three times, including Paris twice this year. It's a bit disorienting to hear about Père Lachaise and then not have a chance to visit it for a quarter of a century and then this is a year in which I visited Jim Morrison’s grave twice. By the way, I have never bought a Doors album. It's strange that considering all the famous people who are interred there it is Jim Morrison who seems to have put the place on the map. (Georges Bizet, Maria Callas (sort of), and Frédéric Chopin are buried there, along with a lot of other notable musicians.)

There are two people that I know of who I saw in life who are now interred in Père Lachaise. I saw Stéphane Grappelli perform three times. His ashes now rest in the Père Lachaise's columbarium. I never saw Michel Petrucciani perform, but I once saw him being pushed in a wheelchair on the Upper West Side. There are maybe others, but I haven't thoroughly combed the list of Père Lachaise's residents.

I got to visit the grave of a childhood hero of mine, Jean-François Champollion--who lies in an easily found area where paths converge on a circle (one of which leads toward Jim Morrison). And, after threading our way up through quite a hillside of graves with only a so-so map to guide us, I found Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), a painter who I learned about and admired in high school (although I had seen his paintings when I was a child but didn't remember his name). I was stuck by the contrasts that time wreaks. Chopin’s music sounds alive now (but, of course, music is an art that is experienced in living time, although I guess all art requires the devotion of some amount of time on the part of the experiencer). Stepping into the little walled garden of Corot's grave I thought of the vividness and beauty of his paintings. But Corot's grave is overgrown with weeds and the stones have shifted and his bronze bust is patinaed bordering on rust. There are thousands of graves here that are not standing up well to the onslaught of time. Ars longa, as they say. I have two translations of À la recherche du temps perdu: I can look at any page at random and even in translation the writing is beautiful and the tone and ideas are not musty or undergoing the kind of degradation that crushes stones. Then again, the forces that have been shifting the masonry of Corot's grave since 1875 might not amount to a millimeter a year of pushing.

When we came out the corner door, the one near the Père Lachaise Mètro stop, the crèpe store was opening up. I had a Nutella and coconut crèpe and an amazingly great café crème. There are many things to appreciate in life.

With my phrasebook in hand I asked the man behind the counter where a post office was--and I understood him! There was one nearby. I stopped at an ATM to get some more euros and asked the lady at the post office for the stamps I needed to send my postcards. This very useful question was not in my semi-useful phrasebook. However, my butchered French was sufficiently understandable and I got what I assume are the necessary stamps.

We then had to catch our ride to the airport to fly to Berlin, a city I have never been to.

[Postscript: "Κατά τον δαίμονα εαυτού" is apparently loosely translated as "True to his own spirit"; like you, I have no idea where this phrase came from and am curious about its source. By the way, the phrase is apparently in Ancient Greek, not Modern Greek.]

Reasons to be cheerful

2007-11-21T10:51:00.001-08:00

Even if you don't own stocks directly, you may have been watching your 401(k) go haywire since approximately February. If you financed your home with a "liar loan" that has reset lately, you might not have been cheery--this whole mortgage meltdown/turmoil in real estate thing. But today I read the following encouraging comment:

Phil Dow, director of equity strategy with RBC Dain Rauscher, also thinks that the economy is in reasonably decent shape.

"There is a disconnect. The economic reality isn't as bad as some are indicating," Dow said. A mentor of mine told me that real risk is at its highest when perceived risk is low. But right now, people are afraid of their own shadow."

(God it must be annoying to work on Wall St. and have "Dow" as a surname, although I guess having a last name such as "Standard" or "Poor" wouldn't be any walk in the park either.)

Anyway, there you have it, a pre-Thanksgiving contraindicator. If more Americans had been scared shitless when they took out all those ARM loans for homes they couldn't afford, we might not have got into this mess in the first place.

For more information about mentors, click here. For additional reasons to be cheerful, here is the full list.

I'm only sleeping

2007-11-20T07:34:00.000-08:00

A rare instance in which my cat is awake and I am not.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Pygmalion

2007-11-18T23:32:00.000-08:00

I thoroughly enjoyed Shaw's Pygmalion today. I must say that I had my doubts after a couple of Gawkers trashed it. I thought they were criticizing Claire Danes's acting ability. But having now seen the Roundabout Theater Company's production I realize that they simply don't know much about Edwardian London, England's class system, and the vast disparity between the rich and the poor at the time. Danes did a fine job, and the interplay between her and Jefferson Mays was superb. (If I may trash the Gawkers for a moment, I don't think they can get over the star of "My So-Called Life" doing a fine job in a great role in one of the twenteith century's great plays.)

I read the play so long ago (college) that I wanted to reread it--also I had never seen it before. But I ended up being too busy cramming for my German exam (I'm flying to Europe on Thursday, and I am going to Germany for the first time).

What struck me about Pygmalion today was, first, that Prof. Higgins has Asperger's syndrome. Hans Asperger described the syndrome in 1944, but Shaw put it up on stage 30 years earlier. Just skimming through the Wikipedia entry on AS one finds phrases such as "characterized by difficulties in social interaction," "Abnormalities include verbosity; abrupt transitions; literal interpretations and miscomprehension of nuance," "show a theoretical understanding of other people’s emotions; however, they typically have difficulty acting on this knowledge in fluid real-life situations," "Individuals with AS may collect volumes of detailed information on a relatively narrow topic," and so on.

I had always thought of this as Liza Doolittle's play, but I don't now. I see Henry Higgins in his parallel Asperger universe--he holds his own, but he does so in his world. At the end of the play he is convinced that it would be a great idea if Liza Doolittle joined him and Colonel Pickering and they lived as three bachelors. If only Liza has Asperger's as well, she probably would have agreed--but then the play would have lost a major dimension of its conflict. I'm not saying it's a story of a man with Asperger's; I'm saying the conflict arises from two universes that cannot intersect--and disparate universes that can (I'm thinking of the themes of wealth and class, which Shaw disaggregates). Shaw apparently wrote an essay explaining why Liza does not marry Prof. Higgins; however, I have not read it. By the way, the funny scenes in this play are really funny.

The second thing I noticed is how Existential this play is--chiefly at the instigation of Prof. Higgins, who is surrounded by non-Existentialists. I have read more Sartre, Camus, and Beckett since I graduated from college--and if I hadn't, I don't know that I would have recognized this strain in the play, including how it informs the social commentary that runs through the work, which on the surface is quite slapstick and layers below pertains to the core of what it means to be a human being. Shaw has become a much better playwright since I first read him in college.

Generous Idealist

2007-11-12T09:00:00.000-08:00

"Composition with Red, Yellow Blue and Black," by Piet Mondrian, 1923

"Red and White," by Josef Albers, 1963

"Generous Idealist," by Tony Powell (with a little help from http://personaldna.com/), 2007

I hope . . .

2007-11-06T09:11:00.000-08:00

. . . Lakshmi Tatma pulls through her operation today and goes on to have a great life--but what were the chances of her being born in India?

Who needs American Idol . . .

2007-11-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

. . . when there's YouTube. This is talent:

I admit it, I'm a YouTube addict.

Secretly . . .

2007-10-23T10:07:00.000-07:00

. . . creepy
For when words don’t even begin. secretly creepy

What Tony is reading

2007-10-22T10:50:00.000-07:00

I have finally finished Emma, which I thoroughly enjoyed--and I am glad there are more Jane Austen books I haven't read yet.

One of the things about travel is stumbling about things that even with a good deal of Internet trolling you might not have ever stumbled upon. This happened to me a couple of times in London earlier this month--and I include serendipities pertaining to things that I know about and yet wouldn't think to seek out.

When I was growing up in London, I was aware of Billy Bunter even though he was before my time. I think the weekly in which stories about him and his friends appeared had ceased publication before I was born--but perhaps not too long before I was born. I was reminded of Bunter & Co. just before my London trip, when I reread some essays by George Orwell, including one he published in 1940 called "Boys' Weeklies," which he describes as "vilely printed twopenny papers, most of them with lurid cover-illustrations."

However, Orwell approved of the Magnet, the weekly that devoted 20,000 words or so--in each issue--to the adventures of Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry Wharton, Johnny Bull, Billy Bunter, and the rest of them at a boarding school called Greyfriars (which is a lot like Hogwarts Academy, by the way). These stories had been appearing in the Magnet since about 1908--they had already been around a long time when Orwell wrote his essay (let me repeat: 20,000 words a week).

Orwell describes an English surreality: These boys live in a kind of permanent 1910--before The Great War. The slang they use was probably obsolete by 1908, when their adventures started (if it was ever real slang--they speak words that make perfect sense but were probably never a part of the real language of men, saying "dash" instead of "damn," for example). There is a sameness of style that leads Orwell to conclude that the stories had been written--and were still being written--by a succession of writers over the years who were required to stick with the official voice that these tales were told in. (Five years later Orwell found out that the stories were all written by one man: Charles Hamilton, who used the pen name "Frank Richards" and was simultaneously writing other stories under other pen names. Egads!)

As I strolled through a bookstore on King's Road (what books would they have that we don't have in New York anyway?) I came across Billy Bunter's Postal Order. Who knew such a thing existed? Well, now both you and I do. It's an audio book, three disks. And I'm glad I bought it and listened to it. Apparently CSA Word produces several of these episodes from the Magnet.

Orwell points out that the stories are what we would tend to think of as wordy, and he quotes one as follows:

'Shutup, Bunter!'

Groan!

Shutting up was not really in Billy Bunter's line. He seldom shut up, though often requested to do so. On the present awful occasion the fat Owl of Greyfriars was less inclined than ever to shut up. And he did not shut up! He groaned, and groaned, and went on groaning.

Even groaning did not fully express Bunter's feelings. His feelings, in fact, were inexpressible.

There were six of them in the soup! Only one of the six uttered sounds of woe and lamentation. But that one, William George Bunter, uttered enough for the whole party and a little over.

But you know what: It works. Although an editor today (O.K., me) would be greatly tempted to condense a passage such as the foregoing, when I listened to the audio book this writer's voice had a hypnotic quality that I found drew me deeper and deeper into the ridiculous world of Billy Bunter and Greyfriars, a world that is probably more English than the English themselves have ever lived in.

Now, if I may climb from the ridiculous back up to the sublime, I am now reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, by Zora Neale Hurston, a writer who is not much remembered these days. I have only got through the first 30 pages or so, but I am completely captivated by her magical phrases--I was not overly surprised to learn that she produced a literary magazine with Langston Hughes at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance.

. . . I used to go to bed early

2007-10-19T11:31:00.000-07:00

I have heard it said that Proust's use of French is very beautiful. I consider it unfortunate that even if I immersed myself in French for the rest of my life, I still would not know for sure, for myself, whether that is true. But if I wanted to get immersed in French for a long time, I suppose I could buy this:

Yes, the whole A la recherche du temps perdu as an audio book, complete, on 111 CDs (139 hours). Normally it's 360.00 €, but this weekend only it's on sale for 299.90 €--while supplies last. I don’t know French well enough to jump at that kind of bargain. In the meantime I will continue to regret that there is no English-language complete audio book of In Search of Lost Time.

The G-word

2007-10-11T12:28:00.001-07:00

Turkey has recalled its ambassador to the U.S. "for consultations." Whatever. Hey, Nabi Sensoy, if you move fast enough, the door won’t hit your ass on the way out. I am not sorry that the truth could prove to be "very injurious . . . to the psyche of the Turkish people."

You can tell I will never be a diplomat.

And nor will Egemen Bagis, a foreign policy adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said in Washington, "Yesterday some in Congress wanted to play hardball. . . . I can assure you Turkey knows how to play hardball." Bagis went on to warn that if the full House passes its nonbinding resolution (declaring the Armenian genocide genocide), "We will do something and I can promise you it won't be pleasant." Oh, come on, Egemen, holocaust denial is soooo 20th century. And you really are protesting too much.

A man on the street, apparently of Turkish origin, told a radio reporter that politicians should stay out of the genocide question and leave it up to historians. Oh, really? Thank you for that insight, Man On The Street. You mean historians in Turkey? A country that convicts citizens of Turkey who write about the topic in a way their government does not agree with?

Our president isn’t much better than that Man On The Street. In his comments yesterday, President Bush was able to describe "the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915" as "historic mass killings." Hmmm, if only there was a convenient one-word term for historic mass killings of members of a specific population. Oh, well. If politicians can't come up with a word, I'm sure some writer or historian will.

In your dreams

2007-10-11T10:26:00.000-07:00

I snoozed after my clock radio went off this morning, and I could swear the man was announcing that Helen Mirren had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. "That's out of left field," I thought. He went onto explain that her key work was The Golden Notebook. "He's way off," I thought. I looked over at my clock: 5:33. I was awake now. I have no idea whether the guy really said Helen Mirren was the winner or my sleep just jumbled up what he did say. Anyway, I would definitly cast Helen Mirren if they make a biopic of Doris Lessing.

Rhinovirus

2007-10-04T12:21:00.000-07:00

I just got back from London last night and I am fighting off a cold. I catch colds when two conditions are present: (1) exposure to the virus and (2) stress.

One thing in London that was not stress is the new production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros that has opened at the Royal Court Theatre, in Sloane Square. This is the theatre where the first English-language production opened in 1960, with Sir Lawrence Olivier (who was thought of as slumming at the time but was reinventing himself and revivifying the Royal Court Theatre) and directed by Orson Welles.

It turns out that Monday night is the cheap night at the Royal Court (£10 all seats), which happened to be a perfect night for me and my parents to go. The costumes are of the era (i.e. 1950s France). The new translation is strong, using a present-day flavor of English without violating the 1950s look of the characters and set. One of the funniest lines is a throwaway (as is so often the case in theatre). The characters are working in a first-floor office and a rhinoceros charges into the ground floor, destroying everything, including the stairs up to the first floor. The characters look over the railing into the destruction below:

To which one of them remarks "This was bound to happen eventually."

!

Maybe you had to be there--and I hope you get to be.

The cold I have now I caught from my father. The stress came from staying up late and waking up early. (My parents don’t stress me anymore--but I can’t explain all that in one blog post.) The next day we went to Kew Gardens. In the cab my father let four HUGE sneezes or, as the Wikipedia calls it, "aerosols of respiratory droplets." There in the sealed London cab careening through those twisted curvy streets I knew it was all over. The next night we saw the Woman in Black and the next day I came back to New York. American Airlines had put me on a later flight, and I felt the cold get me for sure over the Atlantic. The air on the plane was too dry and with screaming babies and people talking, I couldn’t sleep. I looked at my watch: People chattering away at 4:15 a.m. London time. Because of all the security at Heathrow, I’d had to check my bag, meaning it took 40 minutes to reclaim it at JFK. I took the train back to The Bronx, but by then nighttime construction was in full swing and it took 3 hours to get home (instead of the 1 hour it had taken me to get to airport the week before).

I got to bed by 3 a.m. and got up early to fetch Jenny from boarding before I went to work. I dragged into work a bit late and my sinuses majorly stuffed.

YouTube doesn't have a clip of Rhinoceros on YouTube, but it does have a clip of one of the costumes:

(This is what rhinoceroses looked like in France in the 1950s.)

Only as good as your word

2007-09-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

My friend Susan Shapiro's new book, Only as Good as Your Word, is out now. Sue traces the effect mentors had on her life, from when she was a misfit high-school student to her arrival in New York as an aspiring poet to the present day--in which she finds she has become a mentor.

Although Sue’s career has been as a writer and teacher, the stories of her relationships with mentors are instructive for anyone in any industry who has thought to seek out the wisdom of a mentor to guide his or her career. I wish this book existed when I came to New York as a young, starving, unemployed writer. ("[Shapiro] doles out invaluable advice for aspiring scribes. Pulling back the curtain to reveal what it takes to earn a living with words, she emphasizes the usefulness of exploiting one's obsessions, writing about people you love and realizing that a page a day is a book a year. Shapiro's engaging stories about her career trajectory are replete with missteps. She provides guidance on transforming private humiliations into hilarity for the public forum and asserts that when it comes to getting published, 'no' never actually means 'no.' . . . The book's final chapters, which explain how to find a great mentor and be a good protégé, should be required reading for all would-be writers"--Kirkus Reviews.)

I just hope . . .

2007-09-19T08:50:00.001-07:00

. . . that the end of the world has not descended upon us like the first five minutes of a cheaply made science fiction movie. But if it has, I also hope there are two teenagers somewhere--misfits, let’s say, or a nerdy guy and the cheerleader who would never give him the time of day--who will spring into action and save us.

What Tony is reading

2007-09-19T07:57:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed Great Expectations, and I am now reading Jane Austen’s Emma. This is my home reading. On the train into work I am still brushing up my German. Actually, “brushing up” suggests that I have retained some level of German and just need to remind myself. I’m afraid my situation is more desperate than that: I’m just trying to cram as much German as I can prior to my trip in the fall--which might get pushed back to winter.

To that end, I am reading Ranier Maria Rilka’s Letters to a Young Poet. I found a decent translation on the Web and what seems to be a reliable copy in German. I copied these both onto a Word document so that I have English on the left and German on the right. (O.K., I barely know German at all. I just hope that when they find me I can get out the words “Essen, bitte!” before losing consciousness.) Anyway, on the subway I am both reading this marvelous insight on writing and art and studying German. Here is a little of what I read this morning:

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

Mit nichts kann man ein Kunst-Werk so wenig berühren als mit kritischen Worten: es kommt dabei immer auf mehr oder minder glückliche Mißverständnisse heraus. Die Dinge sind alle nicht so faßbar und sagbar, als man uns meistens glauben machen möchte; die meisten Ereignisse sind unsagbar, vollziehen sich in einem Raume, den nie ein Wort betreten hat, und unsagbarer als alle sind die Kunst-Werke, geheimnisvolle Existenzen, deren Leben neben dem unseren, das vergeht, dauert.

Little Pinky visits Golden Gate Park

2007-09-16T22:59:00.000-07:00

There must have been 30 types of grass for sale at the garden shop my friends took me to near Golden Gate Park today. (Yesterday was my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary, and we celebrated it in San Francisco.) We bought Little Pinky in a pint-sized container. Here is a picture of Little Pinky (Pennisetum macroctacium):

Then we had dinner at the Beach Chalet as the sun set and parasailers swooped over the water. After dinner, as the sun was still declining, we went out on the sand. The wind was blowing in strongly from the Pacific Ocean, but the water was calm and the waves were very tame. I dipped my toe in the water. I think it has been ten years since I dipped my toe in the Pacific, although I have been to the West Coast quite a few times--it seemed a shame to come thousands of miles again and not actually touch that ocean.

The sun set beyond the water. There wasn’t a green flash--I think maybe because there was too much fog. Then we drove by the de Young Museum. I had the little pot of Little Pinky in my lap. In front the de Young it’s a loading and unloading area only, and they are very strict about enforcing their rules. To avoid getting ticketed for merely stopping, I got out of the car. I showed the museum’s façade to Little Pinky: “Look, Little Pinky, it’s a beautiful new museum. And look at all the grass they have!” The kids in the backseat got a kick out of that. Then I got back in the car and we were on our way.

Here is the regular Pinky:

. . . although she is at the Huntington, not the de Young.

Hey, Hotshot!

2007-09-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

My friend Beth Herzhaft is a Hey Hot Shot winner this summer, and her work is being shown at the Jen Bekman Gallery (6 Spring St., at Bowery). The opening is September 12--this Wednesday. (Beth, you are always a hotshot winner to me, this summer and every other season.)

St. Agnes's farewell book sale

2007-09-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

The used-book sale this weekend at the St. Agnes Branch (Amsterdam Avenue & W. 81st St.) of the New York Public Library is not only the last before they close for renovatons, it is apparently the last ever (after a 25-year run). I will definitely be there:

September 7, 8, and 9, 2007
Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Sunday, noon - 5 p.m.

The books are plentiful and cheap. And good: Some smart people live on the Upper West Side and when they’re done with their books, they donate them to the library to be sold. I don't know what they're going to do with their old books now. I will certainly miss their sales twice a year.

The job

2007-08-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

If you leave out the left-handed virtuosic rock blues guitar playing, adoring fans, tours, recording sessions, millions of dollars, setting guitars on fire, flashy clothes, and drugs, there is very little difference between what I do for a living and what Jimi Hendrix did--oh, and I guess you need to add accounting book editing.

Here is a case in point: Today I found the following in one of my author’s manuscripts:

However, that raises an obvious question: Wouldn’t a FIN 48 determination that a tax position is not more-likely-than-not sustainable upon examination be inconsistent with a taxpayer’s assertion for tax purposes that the position is based on a reasonable belief that the position is more-likely-than-not proper?

In my world, not only is that an obvious question, our book answers it. My author is grammatically correct, although we are disparaging contractions in this particular publication. That isn’t the toughest sentence I have ever seen, although it is the toughest one I’ve seen today. I need to eliminate the contraction and make the material more readily accessible to our readers. Every editor in the world would propose a different solution. Anyway, I will confer with my author about my suggested fix, and we will mutually find a way to alleviate my concerns.

Now, ignore all that: If you want to see the kind of awesome post that make me question why I even bother blogging, there’s this.

Rebelión en la granja

2007-08-17T16:44:00.000-07:00

I have read so many things since I last posted What Tony is reading that I won’t list them. Life goes on. At home, where I actually concentrate, I am still reading Great Expectations. I had never read Dickens before, and I heard that this was his most complex novel. In the morning on the subway I am brushing up my German for a trip I expect to take this fall. On the way home I am dividing my time between reading things my friends wrote and some essays by George Orwell.

The other night I was reading Orwell's essay “The Prevention of Literature,” which he published in January of 1946. Orwell always has sentences that stand out: “There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature” and “To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox”--and if you don’t agree with such statements, they appear in a persuasive essay that you have the right to read. As so much of Orwell does--or, for that matter, good essay writing--the theme took me on a few unexpected turns, such as how liberals end up advancing totalitarianism. At over 60 years old, some of the paragraphs apply, intact, to civil liberties questions we face today in the ever-widening war on terror.

And then I heard the news about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s latest constitutional reforms, I could only think of Orwell’s Animal Farm, which besides being a political fable is also a brilliant illustration of how one--a nation, let’s say--can find oneself at the bottom of a slippery slope with no idea how one got there. It is simply a matter of time before the Venezuelan people look in the window of the farmhouse and see that the pigs are living exactly as Mr. Jones did.

I'm still here

2007-08-14T17:45:00.000-07:00

I hate that I haven't posted for so long; here is a roundup: On Big Wednesday (August 8th, when we had all the rain), it took me 4 hours to get to work. When I phoned my boss at 10 a.m. to say that I had only made it to 145th St. and was walking through Harlem toward a bus stop, she said "Why don't you have breakfast, and if the trains still aren't moving downtown, go home?" Answer: I don't know how to be me. The bus was amazingly slow because all of Manhattan was a traffic jam. I was tempted to write about that, but remember, Homer only wrote the Odyssey, he didn't have to actually do it.

On Friday I woke up with a cold that was so bad I actually called in sick, something I hardly ever do. I stayed in bed most of the day setting a world record for a sinus headache. I was so incapacitated that when I was listening to a talk show on public radio that I hated, I just lay there and listened to it because the thought of crossing the room and turning the damn thing off barely seemed possible. At that point I wondered whether in fact I had contracted the flu, possibly from all the people I was cooped up with on that bus for three hours on Wednesday.

I got out on Saturday, bought some groceries, ran some errands, back to bed--I never set foot out of my apartment again till Monday morning, when I went to work. I got a little writing done on Saturday. I did a lot of sleeping. Normally I think of sleeping as unproductive, an overly Protestant notion that I am still recovering from. My new ethos is: More sleep = more dreams.

I spent Sunday in my pajamas and worked on my memoir. It's coming along well. I seem to just about have the voice down, which means capturing the perspective of me at age 12. Now that the novel is effectively out of my way and I am devoting myself to this project fully, things are coming back to me: things people said, people's last names, food I ate, magazines I looked at. On Sunday night I had an extremely vivid dream of being in my grandfather’s study, which is the room I lived in for six months on an aluminum cot while my family was in transition. I think what struck me most about the dream was that it proved for me that the details are still there in my memory. The other thing that struck me was my total immersion in this project, which is a major reason why I haven't blogged for three weeks.

On Monday, I sooo wanted to see the Penny show at the UCB Theatre, but I was totally run down by the time I finished work. I went home, had a bowl of soup, and crawled into bed at 9 to read Great Expectations for awhile. At 9:30 I turned out my light and was thinking about now the show would be starting any minute. I fell into a dense sleep and when I woke up and saw that it was 3 a.m. I was also in the afterglow of a dream in which I had just seen Penny's performance. The dream wasn't as vivid as being in my grandfather's study and looking at his books--and it couldn't have been as funny as the real Penny show--but I was glad that in some surreal way I had not *wholly* missed the Penny show.

Tonight is Tuesday. We had a boring meeting that lasted two hours late this afternoon. Since I was there to listen, I shut my eyes--which allows me to concentrate more. My boss told me to at least look awake. So, I spent the next two hours staring at the shiny top of the wooden table while four people blathered about problems that will probably be fixed before they have any effect on me. My soul might have drained out of me during those two hours, but I at least I looked awake. Other people in attendance didn't have anything to contribute either--and they probably looked more awake than me. I wish I could go to Harold Night tonight. I can't; I am too tired, although I am not coughing like I was on the weekend. I need to buy groceries on my way home, which might be a challenge. It's 5:45 here at my desk and I just wish I was reading in bed now as my soul wakes up on the floor of a conference room and wanders back to the Bronx to find me. I can't believe I felt so awful about not posting since July 24 that I'm still here.

Scary thought for the day

2007-07-24T07:31:00.000-07:00

CNN.com has posted the following map showing where Americans have gotten obese since 1985:

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/fit.nation/obesity.map/

New York, I am very disappointed in you: You are about to become a red state. Try to do better. As for 1985, keep up the good work.

She doesn’t even know what spoon is . . .

2007-07-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

. . . although she has seen me use them to transfer her food from its can to her dish--which is an obtuse way of ambling toward my point, namely that last night I was finally back in my apartment in The Bronx, and so was Jenny, my cat. My weekend was exhausting, beginning on Friday after work, when I carried a couple of sacks of books back up to The Bronx, and continued with ten more trips on Saturday and Sunday. (Strategy: Take items such as chairs and bookshelves on the subway very early in the morning.)

On Sunday afternoon I fetched Jenny from my generous friend and took her home--and I still had a few more trips to make. By 1 a.m. I crawled, muscles aching, into bed, losing consciousness almost before my head hit my pillow. When I happened to wake up in the dark sometime later, Jenny was fast asleep against my leg. She woke up and nuzzled her face against my shoulder, saying “massage my neck” and “I’m glad to see you” and “scratch under my chin.” She reclined near me, and as I fell asleep she tapped me on my cheek, saying “pet me more.” So I did. And when dawn woke me up, Jenny was sleeping nestled against my arm. Two months was a long time for us to be apart, with only a few moments in my hectic stupid schedule when I could visit her.

On!

2007-07-18T19:11:00.000-07:00

My apartment renovation is done and I will soon be leaving my sublet in the Greenwood section of Brooklyn, or, as I like to call it on days like this, the Standing Water section of Brooklyn. The rain was falling so hard as I walked to work getting soaked from the thighs down to my socks that my downsloping street was nothing more than a fast-running creek.

This half-Hispanic, half-Polish neighborhood lies on the western edge of the Greenwood cemetery, which means we have a lot more funeral homes, florist shops, and memorial stores than most neighborhoods. I have taken the M train on purpose: Even now when it trundles into my station it surprises me that it still exists in the way that it’s surprising when one finds a shop that still blocks men’s hats or sells moustache wax.

Certain memories of this neighborhood will stay with me: As I walked along 7th Avenue on a sunny day a couple of weeks ago, where it runs along the edge of the cemetery, I wondered about the graves on the grassy hillside--there are geotechnical considerations. And soon I saw and answer: There was a group of four graves with their headstones leaning in different precarious directions and the casket-sized rectangles of grass before them swooped into the slope. They may have stood that way for years or looked like they were. Most likely they are slowly moving--even as you read this. The coffins below gave way and the earth above sagged into the empty space, the grass growing in the sun not at all disturbed.

Another memory: As I was walking by the Jurek Park Slope Funeral Home, on 4th Avenue, on a pleasant summer evening I could not take my eyes off a silver-and-black Cadillac hearse. It wasn’t of a style I recognized, but I guessed it was from the 1970s. My attention was riveted to the back window and its lace curtains, whose edges ludicrously and elegantly came together to leave a post-card-sized opening for anyone who would care to look through the glass. It was then that an attractive blonde woman wearing a short black skirt and black high heels and a rather stylish jacket came out of the funeral home, got into the hearse, and drove away. Life imitates cable television.

The Guerros Taqueria seems to have gone out of business, and I will miss them. Their tacos were delicious and they had about twelve kinds, ranging from al pastor to oreja.

I will not miss the mosquitoes. Probably one of the reasons why sublet was so cheap is that it does not have niceties such as screened windows. So, I have been spraying my entire body with Off! each night before I go to sleep. And for a couple of weeks the itching of fresh mosquito bites would wake me up at 4 a.m.--like clockwork. I finally read the Proustian paragraph in 3 point type on the back of the Off! bottle, with its explanations of how to apply the stuff to children, how to keep chiggers out of the cuffs of your pants, and other information I can’t use, and then I saw it: Off! only lasts for 2 hours. That’s probably on a hiker, for a sleeper in the Standing Water section of Brooklyn, it lasts till 4 a.m.--and man are those lady mosquitoes hungry by then. I am probably now nourishing the grandchildren of the long-dead mosquitoes who were eating me alive when I moved in.

Six or seven years ago, when West Nile virus was a new concern, trucks with nozzles emitting a fine mist of insecticide rolled through the streets of New York. Now there is nothing to be done--or is there? I would just like to add that I am very pro bat and pro dragon fly. Spraying a whole city with poison never held much appeal for me. I wish there was some way to release New York-native species of dragonflies instead. Or erect bat houses.

Brooklyn stigmata

2007-07-15T16:10:00.000-07:00

Here's something I've never done before: I got a mosquito bite in the center of the sole of each of my feet. At first, because they itched, I thought it might be athlete's foot--which I had never had before. But, no, they were mosquito bites. And I can't believe those were easy places to pierce and suck blood from. I know there are easier places because plenty of other mosquitoes found them. I looked like a teenager in the morning--I mean the pimples, not the perpetually haggard look I have developed over the years. Oh, I suppose I should mention that my cheap Brooklyn sublet does not have screens on the windows and it has been really hot lately.

Do what I do

2007-07-05T12:26:00.000-07:00

O.K., I haven't blogged for a while; however, in my defense I'd like to say that this is due to a complete lack of trying. Here is today's installment of what I have come to call Do what I do. (But don't follow my example about not blogging--if you have a blog, you should post stuff.)

An editor I know whose surname begins with the letter S once gave me a piece of advice that I have found to be both simple and brilliant, and that is this: When confronted with a long alphabetized list that you might have to search through all of--but might stop searching through at any point if you find what you're looking for--don't start at the letter A. Start with whatever letter your surname starts with.* For example, I start my searches at the letter P.

I was reminded of this today when I began to comb through a list of 77 potential technical reviewers for two books I have just finished editing. One book is about generally accepted accounting principles for governmental accounting and the other analyzes the standards for generally accepted auditing principals.**

*People whose surnames start with A can ignore this rule--it really only applies to the rest of us.***
**I realize this information simply horrid--although it happens to be perfectly true. And for both of those characteristics I apologize.
***Surely, however, we can all enjoy the kitten scene pictured above, which I found on a blog that is put together by bloggers more prolific than me.

Brother’s Keeper Dept.

2007-06-28T13:08:00.000-07:00

This has not been a good month for depending on the kindness of strangers:

Police: Diabetic Man Missing After Being Kicked Off Train

Group says U.S. citizen wrongly deported to Mexico

Tape: 911 operators did little to help dying woman in ER

As you probably know . . .

2007-06-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

. . . there aren’t enough assholes in the world, at least not in Washington, D.C., or, rather, at least not among lawyers in Washington, D.C. Fortunately, Roy Pearson, Esq., is doing his best to rectify that state of affairs:

Judge aims to have pants suit ironed out next week

A mammal that can live to be 200

2007-06-13T08:53:00.000-07:00

I really can't add to this AP story except (1) I didn't know this about whales and (2) Herman Melville was still alive in 1890 (although by then he was perhaps best known as a retired customs inspector, who had worked at the customs house on Gansevoort St.).

What Tony is reading

2007-06-10T10:03:00.000-07:00

After a craving to read British novels of the first half of the 19th century (which is why I read Frankenstein in February), I got sidetracked. After Frankenstein I read The Namesake because I wanted to know the book before I saw the movie. However, I ended up being too busy to see the movie, which in the meantime has closed. (Good planning, Tony! Well, I was busy with things like visiting Paris and moving to Brooklyn.)

I then read Old Yeller, by Fred Gipson--my craving had shifted to catching up on other things I hadn't read. When all the other boys read Old Yeller, in the Scholastic edition, I read the How and Why Wonder Book of the Human Body. And I didn't see the movie of Old Yeller--although not because I was going to Paris; it was probably because I wanted to see The Ghost and Mr. Chicken instead. I can't help thinking that my life might have gone in a different direction if I had read Old Yeller in second or third grade, when other boys were reading this incipient-testosterone coming-of-age story. Then again, for that to happen I would have had to have been a different person anyway.

In May I read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass--they're late 19th century, but oh, so British. They are also totally crazy books. I hadn't read them since I was 12 and I had forgotten how off-the-wall they were. This is the culture that brought you Monty Python and "I Am The Walrus," which didn't suddenly spring out of nowhere in the 1960s. By the way, here's a trippy fact I gleaned from the Wikipedia: When Alice Liddell was hard up for money, she auctioned off the handwritten manuscript of Alice's Adventures Under Ground that Lewis Carroll had given her. In 1932 she visited America when the manuscript was displayed at Columbia University for the 100th anniversary of Lewis Carroll's birth, and it was on that trip (when she was 80 years old) that she met Peter Llewelyn-Davies, one of the brothers who were the inspiration for J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. So, there you have it: Alice in Wonderland met Peter Pan, and I’m sure if you had enough patience you could eventually connect them to Kevin Bacon.

I also read Growing Up, by Russell Baker. On Monday I finished Wuthering Heights. And I am now reading a P.D. James for the first time, A Certain Justice--which is British but certainly not from the first half of the 19th century, which I still want to get back to.

In the new

2007-06-03T12:39:00.000-07:00

This phenomenon of doing new things--or at least recognizing them, whether they be trivial or grand--is contagious. Last night I did something new: I spent the night in Brooklyn. I know that doesn't sound impressive, but I have lived in New York for over half my life, and I have spent the night in Queens, Manhattan, and The Bronx--because I have lived in all those boroughs. But never Brooklyn.

My Bronx apartment is being renovated, and I found a good sublet deal on craigslist. By Saturday night I was all set up; so there I fell asleep in the back room on the top floor of a three-story brick walkup to the sounds of people in the yard below chatting and drinking beer. The apartment doesn't have air-conditioning; so, keeping the window open for cross-ventilation in this weather is essential. Jenny is staying with a friend, also in Brooklyn--her first night ever in Brooklyn was Friday.

I have been in Brooklyn late at night before. One of my first jobs in New York was monitoring fire and police radios and dispatching a freelance TV crew. As I went off shift at 2 a.m. one winter night, the crew was in our Times Square office dubbing tapes to deliver to TV stations when the radios came alive with dispatchers sending fire engines to a two-alarm blaze in Brooklyn. "Ever seen a fire, Tony?" one of the guys said. I hadn't, and so I went with them. We sped through empty New York, running red lights, and when we got to the fire, which was on Avenue U or something, I carried a spare battery belt for the crew. Nobody got hurt in the fire, and a cat that had been overcome by smoke inhalation was revived on the hood of the fire marshal's car. That was the clip that ended up on the local news later that morning.

A house fire has an awful mixture of smells: The pleasant smell of burning pine, which you might experience in your fireplace when you're glad to be home on a dark winter evening. But it's mixed with the dust and dirt of dry old timbers and the buttery smell of burning paint, which might contain lead. And the burning tar of the roof. And the house's vinyl siding. This smell sticks in your hair and coats the inside of your nose for days. You smell like fire till you get your clothes off and take a shower and then you still smell like a fire.

Last night was a lot more restful than that. And I'm going to do it again tonight.

Food for the soul

2007-05-29T09:00:00.000-07:00

The reading tonight that will include Ian Frazier, Susan Shapiro, and Holy Apostles Church soup kitchen writers workshop participants reading their latest stories and poems will be a lot of fun--and good for your soul!

Wednesday, May 30
7:00 p.m.
Holy Apostles Church
W. 28th St. & 9th Ave.

It's free and open to the public, although most people will make a donation at the door.

What Tony is Dreaming: No Problem

2007-05-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

Three weeks ago today I was in Paris having an extremely French day: Used book shops on the left bank, bouquinistes, café crème at a sidewalk café with my friend, contemporary theatre, and a dinner whose first course was a thick warm blood pudding on toast with a layer of caramelized peaches on top, presented in a perfect, hockey-puck-shaped and sized disk.

Last night I dreamed I was suddenly back in Paris. It was a rush trip. In fact, I had come with only my wallet, as if while at lunch I went to Paris instead of back to work. In the dream, R.G. Sand and I are on a houseboat in Paris--not having planned far enough in advance to make hotel reservations.

"You wanted to be back in Paris, and here you are," R.G. Sand says.

I go through my pockets and find my ATM card.

"We can get euros," I say. "I can't believe I left my map at home. Now I'll have to buy another. And I need a pen." I open a drawer in a desk on the houseboat. It is filled with pencils, compasses, fountain pen nibs, erasers . . . "I still need to buy a pen," I say. "And paper."

The interior of the cabin is roomy. It's wooden and cozy. The capacious room is lighted by sconces and the many windows are hung with translucent white organdy. We go out on the deck. The houseboat is floating on the Canal Saint Martin.

"I know where we are," I say. "Les Abîmés has closed, but I can show you where the Théâtre du Marais is without a map. It's on the other side of the Place de la République." We debark and head toward Rue de Malte. (At the beginning of this month the Place de la République was the hub of my universe for a whole week.) "We can get some money and I can show you where that restaurant is. Maybe the theatre has another play." I'm sure that's the first thing you would do when you get to Paris: Find the theatre.

"We should get an umbrella," says R.G. Sand. "Look."

I can't say it was frightening, but a huge cloud, like thick black wool was drifting toward us--actually all of Paris.

"It's Sarkozy!" shouts R.G. Sand. "And it's coming right toward us!" Now it is frightening, and we run.

The cloud is so huge and so close and so thick I can reach up and almost touch it

"It probably isn't that bad even if it is Sarkozy," I say as we get back to the houseboat and go inside. (Sometimes I am overly rational in my dreams.) The rain starts. "See? It's just rain." I resume searching through my pockets. "I forgot to bring my passport," I say. And as the black wool Sarkozy rain turns the view out the houseboat windows to a complete blur I contemplate that without my passport I will not be able to leave Paris. No problem.

Letting the serendipities happen

2007-05-23T12:09:00.000-07:00

I have a bad habit of trying to make things happen when--and I know better--if I didn't, they would happen anyway if they were meant to, or not happen if they were not meant to, or something better would happen. This is not to say that my philosophy of life is that things go best when I float along passively letting things happen. Rather it is the recognition of my uncanny ability to wreck what I'm trying to do. Or if I actually brought about what I thought I wanted, I would be precluding something better--and unanticipated--from happening. It's like when I was six years old and the Zimmer kids said there was a robin's nest in their attic. We all took turns trying to lift out the beautiful blue eggs--which broke the moment we even touched them. "Here, let me try," I said when I watched Danny Zimmer cloddishly destroy one of the eggs between his thumb and forefinger. The one I tried to lift broke too--their shells were as thin as tissue paper. If we had done nothing, there would have been baby birds.

That's way too much preamble to get to here: namely that I knew Marcel Proust lived at 102 Boulevard Haussmann and that the room where he wrote most of Remembrance of Things Past is now an office of a bank. However, Boulevard Haussmann is quite long, and I didn't know the cross street--so, I had no intention of looking for it. For what? To take a picture of me in front of the building? To bother the bank people?

We found it anyway. I might as well say Proust's apartment building found me. Here is a picture of me looking rumpled and touristy (don't worry, I told everyone I was from Texas) doing what hundreds of people do all day long--getting their picture taken in front of the building where the greatest novel of the twentieth century was written:

Here I am eating a hotdog (or, as the French say, "un hot dog") in the gardens surrounding Notre Dame with someone who is more glamorous than I will ever be:

Thank you for taking those pictures, Marty!

To Proustify

2007-05-18T16:35:00.000-07:00

Marcel Proust spoke in long sentences early in life. By the time he was in junior high or high school his friends made up a word for it that translates into English as "to Proustify." In Search of Lost Time is a very long book--which doesn't mean you will drop dead upon finishing it. However, there are people who claim that it is the best novel written in the 20th century. If they are right, all those other novels you read in the rest of your life just won't as good as they might have been if you'd saved Proust till last.

I bought a full paperback set of what I call "the Kilmartin edition" for just $47.25, which is cheaper than used copies on eBay. This edition is the C.K. Scott-Moncrieff translation that Terence Kilmartin revised based on a better edition of Proust in French being made available. Kilmartin's revision also eliminates Scott-Moncrieff's excesses. I have only read the first part: Swann's Way (656 pages).

I have so far managed to assemble three of the volumes of the six-volume edition that editor Christopher Prendergast oversaw, published by Viking in 2003. This got my attention when I saw the smashing review Lydia Davis received for her translation of the first part: Swann's Way (468 pages). Apparently Viking had a big print run for the first volume but printed fewer copies of some of the others. It doesn't seem to be sold as a set; so, you have to track down its parts. I have never seen all six volumes together in a bookstore. In her introduction, Davis says that Proust is not wordy. In fact, she says, he is concise, but it takes him as many words as it does to articulate the fineness of nuance that he achieves.

I'm reading other stuff right now, but I do occasionally dip into the 2003 Penguin edition. In The Guermantes Way, translated into English by Mark Treharne, I found the following:

Ever since I had ceased to see actors solely as the depositories, in their diction and acting ability, of an artistic truth, the had begun to interest me in their own right; with the feeling that I was watching the characters from some old comic novel, I was amused to see the naïve heroine of a play, he attention drawn to the new face of some young duke who has just taken his seat in the theater, listen abstractedly to the declaration of love the juvenile lead was addressing to her, while he, through the rolling passion of this declaration, was in turn directing an enamored eye at an old lady seated in a stage box, whose magnificent pearls had caught his interest; and in this way, largely owing to what Saint-Loup had told me about the private lives of actors, I saw another drama, silent but telling, being played out beneath the words of the play that was being performed, yet the play itself, however uninspired, was still something that interested me, too; for within it I could feel germinating and blossoming for an hour in the glare of the footlights--created out of the agglutination on the face of an actor of another face of greasepaint and pasteboard, and on his individual soul the words of a part--the ephemeral and spirited personalities, captivating, too, who form the cast of a play, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one would like to met again after the play is over, but who by that time have already disintegrated into the actors, who are no longer what they were in their roles. into a script that no longer shows the actors' faces, into a colored powder that can be wiped off by a handkerchief, who have reverted, in a word, to elements that contain nothing of them, because their dissolution is complete as soon as the play has ended, and this, like the dissolution of a loved one, causes one to doubt the reality of the self and to meditate on the mystery of death.

That paragraph is one sentence long. That isn't the longest sentence in In Search of Lost Time, and Proust did not always write in long sentences. But it is a tribute to Proust as an author and Treharne as a translator that it is a beautiful sentence--the kind of thing that Proust produces, sentence after sentence, for thousands of pages. And although it is a translation, few native-English-speaking writers today can ever hope to write a sentence as good.

I don't really know French, but, for the curious, here is the foregoing translated passage in Proust's own words:

Depuis que les acteurs n'étaient plus exclusivement, pour moi, les dépositaires, en leur diction et leur jeu, d'une vérité artistique, ils m'intéressaient en eux-mêmes; je m'amusais, croyant contempler les personnages d'un vieux roman comique, de voir du visage nouveau d'un jeune seigneur qui venait d'entrer dans la salle, l'ingénue écouter distraitement la déclaration que lui faisait le jeune premier dans la pièce, tandis que celui-ci, dans le feu roulant de sa tirade amoureuse, n'en dirigeait pas moins une oeillade enflammée vers une vieille dame assise dans une loge voisine, et dont les magnifiques perles l'avaient frappé; et ainsi, surtout grâce aux renseignements que Saint-Loup me donnait sur la vie privée des artistes, je voyais une autre pièce, muette et expressive se jouer sous la pièce parlée, laquelle d'ailleurs, quoique médiocre, m'intéressait; car j'y sentais germer et s'épanouir pour une heure, à la lumière de la rampe, faites de l'agglutinement sur le visage d'un acteur d'un autre visage de fard et de carton, sur son âme personnelle des paroles d'un rôle, ces individualités éphémères et vivaces que sont les personnages d'une pièce, séduisantes aussi, qu'on aime, qu'on admire, qu'on plaint, qu'on voudrait retrouver encore, une fois qu'on a quitté le théâtre, mais qui déjà se sont désagrégées en un comédien qui n'a plus la condition qu'il avait dans la pièce, en un texte qui ne montre plus le visage du comédien, en une poudre colorée qu'efface le mouchoir, qui sont retournées en un mot à des éléments qui n'ont plus rien d'elles, à cause de leur dissolution, consommée sitôt après la fin du spectacle, et qui fait, comme celle d'un être aimé, douter de la réalité du moi et méditer sur la mort.

Mr. Coughy

2007-05-11T12:51:00.001-07:00

I have a long ride from my D stop in The Bronx to my job at W. 15th St. and 8th Ave., but at least I always get a seat. Today the guy sitting behind me coughed four or five times a minute all the way down to midtown Manhattan--about 45 minutes till he finally got off. I am mindful that the New York City Subway is mass transit for pathogens too. I can't say that I blame the guy: He should've stood in bed. But there were times when I had a deadline and went to work with a cold--and probably infected everybody. So, deadline met, and it's not as if there's an incentive to stay home sick.

When I got to work this morning, I Googled to find out whether there were any health benefits to catching cold (why not think positive!). I didn't find any benefits, but I did find this news item. Also, if that guy's condition deteriorates totally, there is at least this positive benefit. Presumably my fellow passenger from The Bronx is a Yankees fan.

Off Off Off Off Broadway: Les Abîmés

2007-05-05T18:00:00.000-07:00

This was one of those long travel days that make a mockery of distance. I began this day with café crème and pain du chocolat with my friends at a little place on the corner of Rue des Archives and Rue de Bretagne. Paris was cool from the rain last night, and we were up early enough on a Saturday morning that the city had just a smattering of traffic and people walking their dogs as we waited for our van to the airport. Later today I found myself in my local supermarket in the Bronx picking up a few groceries till I figure out what to do tomorrow. So close and so far and seen through a sense of time distorted by jet lag.

Now that I’m not married I don’t have to spend obsessive amounts time shopping for accessories (shoes, handbags, watch bands). I wanted to see what was happening in the Paris equivalent of Off Off Broadway theatre. So, I did. This was a trip filled with serendipities, by the way; the best things I found seemed to be making a point of manifesting themselves without my looking for them. This was how I found the Théâtre du Marais, at 37 rue Volta, in the 3rd Arrondissement, not far from my hotel, off the Place de la République: On Thursday I had stopped off at an ATM to get more euros and the damned machine rejected my card (thank you, you damned beautiful blessed machine!). So I combed the streets looking for another ATM half wondering if the computers at Chase had cut off my card for suspicious activity (i.e. cash withdrawals in a foreign city). If they’ve cut off my card, I’ll let them have an earful, I’m thinking as I wander up and down alleys past cheap shoe stores looking for a main street with banks and ATMs. I turned a corner and there it was: Could I believe my eyes? It could be a storefront theatre in New York. Rue Volta, no need to write that down--I had an adviser in college named Volta. The play was Les Abîmés.

My friends, Marty and Rebeca, were busy the next night with Marty’s relatives, which gave me a chance to go see the play. At 10 minutes to 7 I headed out of my hotel for the 7:30 show--or, as the French say, “19 h 30”--and could not find the theatre. I could not remember the name of the street. Now every street name looked familiar and I couldn’t remember the mnemonic about my college adviser’s name. I started looking for narrow streets with cheap shoe stores. I started looking for the ATM that had rejected my card except now I was coming across more ATMs than you ever thought Paris had. I tried to find the ATM that had accepted my card and work backwards from there. Then it started to rain. A walk down a long narrow street on a warm night with plenty of rain. I turned a corner--a different one from the night before--and there it was. They were just setting up to sell tickets.

I checked my phrasebook, looking up how to say “Is a seat available for tonight?” The man said yes and sold me a ticket (€15). He then asked me (in French) if I realized that the play was in French (wow, my accent must be really bad if I can use a grammatically correct and complete phrase out of my book and still sound like I have no idea what I’m talking about). I told him I understood.

Can I level with you? That wasn't exactly true. My French is not very good. My listening and reading comprehension are easily 10 times my ability to create my own sentences and say them and be understood. And when I say “listening comprehension,” it’s like a very static-y radio that lets you have wisps of phrases here and there supplemented by occasional disconnected words.

Someone in the doorway asked me--with a resonant voice that I envy--something in French. I thought he was asking me whether I was from New York. But I wasn’t sure; however, if he was, he was using real French rather than the schoolbook formal French that gets foisted off on students as if they would never be able to learn to read Flaubert if they learned colloquial French first (colloquial is harder to learn, by the way, not some lazy shortcut). Anyway, my mind went blank trying to think of the phrase to ask the guy to repeat his question. I gave up and told him that I didn’t speak French--which as soon as I said I regretted, because I wanted to say I didn’t speak French well (the phrase is only one word different in French as well as in English).

As the rain grew heavier and then lighter the rest of the audience milled with me outside the theatre. This audience looked more committed than audiences I have seen at Off Off Broadway shows in New York. For one thing it wasn’t demographically overweighted toward any particular group. There were trendy-looking young people, there were couples, there were people who came alone (I wasn't the only one), there were old people, I saw what I took to be a mother and her daughter, and so on. Yay culturally astute audiences who support the theatre and are rewarded with fine contemporary plays!

The house opened. The Théâtre du Marais is a small black-box theatre that seats about 45. There were 25 or 30 audience members--not a bad turnout on a rainy night for a contemporary play that costs €15.

Les Abîmés is about two couples, played by a marvelous cast in their early 20s to early 30s (Bénédicte Budan, Nicolas Martinez, Rébecca Azan, and Philippe Meimoun). I don’t know whether the play, written by Michaël Cohen, has been translated into English. The word “abîmé” means “hurt” or “damage” but it also has a meaning of--or at least a resonance with--“gulf” in the sense of a chasm. The couples are not complete emotional cripples, but they do have difficulty making contact across emotional chasms and this inability is played out in different ways. Bénédicte Budan is pretty and willowy and her scenes with Nicolas Martinez tend toward the tenuousness of human connection. Rébecca Azan makes her entrance marching onto the stage mid-tirade--and to her credit as an actress, the vulnerability of the character seeps through her tough façade. Her scenes with Philippe Meimoun and their tendency toward anger and high energy as a substitute for (and impediment to) intimacy illustrate a different way for a couple to not cross the emotional chasm.

A clip has been posted on YouTube:

Unfortunately that clip left out what I thought was most affecting action in the play, that of Bénédicte Budan placing Nicolas Martinez’s hand on her face to show him how to reach her.

Hurry if you want to see this play: It closes on May 13th.

Hot shows

2007-04-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

Marx The Spot is going to be a great show. And I wouldn't mention it on my blog till after I reserved my ticket first:

Monday, April 23
8:00 p.m.
UCB Theatre
307 W. 26th St. (corner of 8th Ave. and W. 26th St.)

The cost is $5.

Meeting moment of the day

2007-04-23T09:39:00.000-07:00

I work in a *very large* publishing company, with offices all over the U.S., as well as international offices. We are undergoing a companywide quality initiative.

Today was the *kickoff* of the initiative, and me and my department coworkers were among the 400 participants listening in via conference call to a meeting that was taking place in a Midwestern city that shall remain nameless. PowerPoints were provided to us via the Web to accompany the highly enthusiastic explanations of "six sigma," "change agents driving the culture," "working smarter, not harder," and so on.

Then a PowerPoint came up with a little animated graphic of a kicking karate guy, and we heard a woman on the conference call shrieking with laughter: "Look at that little karate guy! Ha! Ha! Ha! Jeeeezus! Ha! Ha! Ha! Holy shit!" and so on--we started laughing too.

"Could participants on the conference call please be sure their phones are on mute," the change agent a thousand miles away said, not acknowledging the utter ludicrousness of the tiny karate guy and his determined tiny kicks.

As I walk down the street . . .

2007-04-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

. . . people point at me and say "There goes Crazy-Hair Tony!"

O.K., nobody does that. This is New York: I could walk for hours and not see anyone who has any idea who I am or who could possibly care about my hair. I had a slight trim 6 months ago, and things are very much untrimmed now. I wish my hair grew faster, because then I could have made up my mind faster about whether or not to cut it. A consensus is forming that I should.

So here's the question: Should I get my hair cut on Tuesday because I’m meeting an author and ought to make a better impression than I otherwise might (as opposed to, for example, giving the impression that I have not heard of this thing called a haircut and would not know where to get one) or should I get my hair cut in Paris--which will also make me look for a while like I got my hair cut in Paris?

I know most of the people who read this blog, and I invite you to leave a comment answering the foregoing question. If you don’t know me, you could always guess at an answer. Lord knows, I’ve taken surveys on other people’s blogs where I was just guessing.

À la recherche du pain perdu

2007-04-20T12:09:00.000-07:00

I had dinner at the Mercer Kitchen with my two birthday friends last night. Somehow the people milling about the corner of Prince and Mercer and flowing in and out of the ground floor of the Mercer Hotel and down into the Mercer Kitchen all look like movie stars, record moguls, and models--yours truly excepted. And some of them probably actually are those things.

I started with the pea soup and for and entrée I had the barramundi--which I didn’t know was a fish until last night. I had only previously thought of it as a Lower East Side bar--whose name always struck me as implying a pun of something. The barramundi came with lentils. That was probably a healthy meal, in addition to being delicious.

The dessert menu listed “banana pain perdu.” Even with my limited French I can figure out that “banana pain” is “banana bread,” but perdu? Something idiomatic was going on (surely not “lost bread”). I turned to my friend R. G. Sand, who explained that “pain perdu” is what the French call French toast--yes, bread burning in hell.

So, R. G. Sand, the boulangeries of Paris await! (And, yes, kaseumin, I will be thinking of you.)

Strange . . .

2007-04-19T08:31:00.000-07:00

. . . I just feel so happy today. No reason. I’m going to have carrot cake with my lunch--which is typical. I’m working like mad to get a week ahead at my job--because in 10 days I will be in Paris for a week. Tonight I’m having dinner with two friends to celebrate their birthdays (which are just a couple of days apart). And I feel great!

Where are they now: Brooks Brown

2007-04-18T18:00:00.000-07:00

NPR, May 22, 1999

NPR, April 18, 2007

Apparently I am not . . .

2007-04-17T16:57:00.000-07:00

. . . the only person who does not know how to be me:

- - -

I realize we are all ONE, yet I still feel that I am an individual being. I feel such pressure to try to eradicate the notion that I am an individual. I try to force myself to see that I am the same being as everyone else. I have not slept a decent night's sleep in three months and have the worst kind of headaches and full body energy spasms because I don't know how to be "me", since I am told there is no "me". I no longer know how to "be" because my mind keeps coming in and saying "no, this is wrong, you are not enlightened, you are still believing that you are an individual". [LeonardJacobson.com]

- - -

I’ve spent my entire life living for other people. Whatever someone needed, I was. I was best friend, sister, mother, and much much more to so many people. I lost myself in the service of others. The only place I found freedom was in my writing, but then others caught on that that’s what I was doing in my spare time, so then I took on the role of teacher. (Which I don’t mind so much because researching the art and technical aspects of writing is how I got to where I am today.)

I guess I’m saying that after years of that, I don’t know how to be me. I don’t know what that means. I know some things I like, I know how I like some things to be done but I just don’t know who I am. [The New Australian]

- - -

I don’t know how to love me,
How can I set myself free?
Am I really that deserving?
To live so happily?

I don’t know what to do with myself,
I don’t know what to be,
I don’t know how to let go,
I don’t know how to be me.
[Carolyn Uhm]

- - -

I don’t know how to reconcile who I am with who others think I am. I don’t know how to be me when others would prefer that I not, nor how to deal with the stress, hurt and alienation brought on by the feeling that whatever I am is just not good or loveable enough. I don’t know how to take all the pieces that make me “Tere” and make it all fit together. [A Mom, a Blog, and the Life In-Between]

- - -

it's really hard for me to make friends, and i don't know why, before i was adopted i had lots of them. also it's really hard for me to have a boyfriend, all the guys that end up liking me.. i turn away from them. it's really hard for me. it seems that i've been away from people so long( being an olny child in all) i don't know how to be me in front of people. and it makes me really nervous. i have really good friends at church and all. When i'm around them i do fine but when they're not there, i don't know how to act. i'm also affraid to tell people what's wrong. every time they ask i lie and say i'm doing fine just so they can go away. iam really, really not happy. i am also sorry about not writing this all in order, anyway please give me advice. I really need some, noone i know seems to care about how i feel. So please help. [Ask helpmebrenda!]

- - -

I can't do that, I can't be myself. Ask me to do anything but don't ask me to be myself. I'll be Queen Victoria but I don't know how to be me. [MuppetCentral.com]

- - -

had tea with ray at sushi train tonight.

interesting.

my first proper 'date' with a 'stranger' since andrew broke up with me. it's weird. it's as if i don't know how to act. i don't know what to do. i don't know how to be me.

it's quite embarrassing actually...

he asked to see me next weekend... not sure about that one yet...
[thoughts extracted...]
- - -

i'm afraid of you and being myself around you and that doesn't make sense. i feel sometimes so insecure, which you would never believe if i told you. and that is exactly why i cannot ever tell you this. but it makes no sense. i am insecure, and hide things from you like how i am constantly looking at the world as if i had a camera - angles and positioning, and i can never stop, it is always there, ever since i was little - and how i wish eating was more avoidable and how beautiful you are in the almost-light and that is why i turned off the lights, not because i wanted to sleep. and yet even though i am afraid of my body in some ways, and would never remove my layers myself, i don't mind when you peel them away. because that means you want to, and i'm not imposing myself. everyone loves us and i think the problem is i don't know what us means. i don't know how to be me but i am afraid of being us, and this grey area in the middle is appeasing nobody's need for gossip. [the sound of smiles]

- - -

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Fellow Don’t Know-ers,
thank you for being so beautiful. When all else fails, I turn to How To Be A Person, but that’s just
me.