Some interesting stuff to consider

The ratio of cabs to non-cabs in New York City is one-to-one (count all the autos in the picture if you don’t believe me, the parked ones in addition to the vehicles cut off by the edges of the photo).

People who live in New York often experience boredom.

Brooklyn now (un)officially starts at 57th Street.

Joy Behar buses drive too fast.

Loitering is down in the Big Apple, and shrubbery is being exposed to less crack.

But I’m still going to sit down tonight.

Sympathy for the Devil

A question I posed to True/Slant blogger Richard Ungar who thinks President Obama should sue Rush Limbaugh for defamation regarding comments he uttered during a Fox news interview:

I do think Rush should be sued (or better yet physically pilloried) but can’t his lawyers make the case that he was conjecturing when he said those defamatory things? Sure, such offhand and out loud guessing might turn out to be recklessly misrepresenting of the president, but it seems like this defense provides enough wiggle room to escape the intending-to-cause-malice allegation. Answering for his unthinking statement, can’t Rush escape censure by basically claiming that – regardless of what documents and friends of the president say – he truly believed when he said those things that the president is ‘probably’ (big word here) guilty of committing plagiarism? Such a fact, if true, might greatly lower the standards and expectations of political punditry, but it clears Rush of making knowingly false statements which only indirectly appeared to intend malice.

Just my thoughts (I’m not a lawyer or law student by the way).

EDIT: Ungar’s reply-

Tim – nope. Conjecture would be if he said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if…” or “I don’t know if its true or not but I heard that…”.

Limbaugh’s statement was stated as a fact. Unless it’s true or was not made with utter disregard for the truth, it is slander.

I’m am a lawyer and I would take this case in a heartbeat.

 Conclusion: I guess rhetoric is no match (or substitute) for how the law works.

Vestiges

His hands are like God’s when he feeds her

and wipes the spittle from her mouth.

He is old—going on 70—with an uncertain prostate.

He is my father.

* 

She is a breaking-down machine,

Her spirit gone out of her to some place

from whence it will return in a few years

to visit me in the night asking, “What happened?”

She is my mother.

 *

We all share her illness together.

Our lives are her only thank you for our patient endurance.

 *

-2008

sweetness follows

“You’re out of pain now, mom. All of us are out of pain now.”

My dad walked into the other room crying. He walked back into the room and leaned over mom’s body and stroked and kissed it. “Oh, Mimi!” he cried. “Oh, Mimi, I love you.”

There were several more I-love-you’s from Andy and John, but I’m never sure if I said it or not (my mom knows I loved her). Andy and John both kissed mom too.

I couldn’t help wondering, as all this was going on, if mom was 100% dead or not. I had seen a dead body at my apartment building once. I came out of a doorway on the first floor and almost stepped over an old man who had collapsed from a heart attack in the hallway. The paramedics were giving him CPR as a few neighbors and his dog looked on. I remember how dead that man looked, how lifeless and empty. I had heard dead people often described as looking like they’re sleeping, but this man did not look asleep. He looked vacant. His body emitted no life or spirit whatsoever.

I wondered if there would be a similar dramatic change in my mom’s physical appearance when she passed. But there was no such thing. It did in fact look like she was peacefully sleeping, and this led me to believe that perhaps she hadn’t expired all the way. I thought maybe her breathing had stopped but wondered if her heart might still be beating. I thought that perhaps she was going to die in stages, or maybe even come back to life. I was entirely prepared for the possibility of her respiration resuming and the little bit of fading animation returning to her features. If this happened, I thought of how foolish it would make us all look, and briefly considered how many jokes we would need to crack in order to compensate for our being caught so off guard. But the longer my mom lay there not moving, twitching or breathing, the more it became evident to me that she was not going to go out like a moribund wind-up toy. And the longer I stared down at her and stroked her hair, the clearer it became that she was dead.

It was this stark realization that mom – my mom – was dead and that she was never going to utter another word, look at me or hug or kiss me again. It was sort of like the cold frightening feeling of watching yourself ejaculate for the first time and knowing that you will never be the same person again, that your life has irreversibly changed and a big piece of it is lost forever.

It was scary and refreshing at the same time, the manifesting of so many delayed fears but also a burdensome weight lifted off the shoulders.

The Disappearing Females of New York

 

WE ARE ALL quite familiar with their faces and voices, the everyday passel of sculpted talking heads conveying in rich words and quick expressions their troves of personality, nuance, charisma and mystique.

 

  

And their bodies, like this phalanx of beauties (right), cleaving to so much and so little, where worldliness and truth collide and strive to flow with perfect graceful symmetry, trailing a lifetime of memory and experience in their wakes like so many celebratory “just married” cans rattling behind a car’s rear bumper…

  

But suddenly! Like timeless statues, the heads and arms of these angels fall away.

  

The result is a bit grotesque but also justifying. In the same way a headless and armless ancient statue seems to say, “Look, I am beautiful even without my head and arms, and my brokeness is a testament to my old age and the fact that I’ve influenced every artist that came after my creator,” these incomplete women demand to be looked at in all their headless and armless glory.

 

But then, perhaps because of its irrelevance to the rest of the machine, the torso decides to fall by the wayside as well.

(The molting process already begun, the body may also shed the breast-carrying section of its anatomy in a jealous fit of rage at the way the chest often supercedes the rest of the package.)

 

 

Disaster though this is, there are still plenty of half-completed specimens that line up with our priorities and which still manage to cause at least one traffic jam every hour. We don’t particularly like filling in the blanks when it comes to our life partners, but this is why TV and books were invented, right?

But pretty soon, in a fierce and rebellious gesture of breaking away, the adored buttox and front buttox - the gateway by which we enter into all our dreams and longings, the very foundation of existence itself – crumbles leaving a mere foot, calf and thigh in its place.

These mute walking legs are a hollow vestige of what used to be. Their pad-footed silence and stiletto clicking, buoyantly supporting the weight of an invisible nothingness above it, eerily augment the city’s angry male sounds. All that is heard is grunting, huffing, puffing, cursing, honking, snarling, teeth-gnashing and spitting. But very often men will still whistle at these prancing and swaggering legs though they are deaf and blind to any forms of overt pining or seduction.

But just as soon as we get used to these strange new two-legged friends, they are gone also. It is as if they could not stand to be around all the crass and sweating men. Soon, only feet and half of a calf remain. Though these feet are beautiful and sexy, they are still feet nonetheless. The incompleteness of these objects quickly prove to be a tease we cannot endure.

All we can do is play footsie with them or fetishize them, but nothing more.

 

*

ALL THE WORLD falls to ruins. Everything grinds to a halt. Sports, commerce, learning, gastronomy, competing, fighting, healing the sick, burying and remembering the dead  - everything becomes meaningless. Men march out into the streets and await the return of their females. They await the return of the Female. They call her mother, sister, aunt, cousin, grandma, friend, lover, woman, madame, miss, Mrs., sista, pal, lady, buddy, wife, snooki, niney, or any other cute nickname.

After a moment of silence that seems to go on interminably - a moment of silence that could end humankind if it lasted any longer than that dreaded and unbearable silence lasted - she deigns to reappear again, and to have another go at it.

All the men rejoice and exhale a gasping sigh of relief.

Life, thusly, returns to normal again.

This Just In (week’s recap)

BARACK OBAMA OUR SKINNIEST PRESIDENT EVER!!!

TAKE A LOOK AT THIS VIDEO, CHRISTIANS TRY TO KILL CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS.

AND THE 700 CLUB’S PAT ROBERTSON REPORTED THAT SATAN AND HIS MINIONS HAVE DESTROYED THE CAPITAL OF HAITI. THAT’S RIGHT…SATAN HAS DESTROYED PORT AU PRINCE, HAITI. YEAH, APPARENTLY HE WAS BANGING TOO HARD ON THE CEILING OF HELL WITH HIS TRIDENT. THEY WERE ALL LISTENING TO KESHA’S “TICK TOCK” AND GOT A LITTLE CARRIED AWAY.

Look, Looook, I wrote a song

NEW ME

*

Your wildest dream

turns to everyday,

no pinching nerves

can take it away,

when the water flows

you stand and gaze,

you’re all made up

you know the maze.

*

chorus

don’t need no masquerade,

don’t need no pay-to-play,

all those gifts in the sleigh,

will just melt away,

melt away,

melt a-way.

*

the streets’ new whisper,

the trees’ new sway,

somebody’s prison,

hollow clay,

hollow clay.

*

chorus

don’t need to masquerade

don’t need to pay to play,

all those gifts in his sleigh,

will just fade away,

fade away,

fade a-way.

*

don’t need no masquerade,

don’t need to pay to play,

all those gifts in the sleigh,

are just fading away,

fading away,

fade a-way.

*

repeat chorus

I Can See You

The growing popularity of websites like Skype mark the ushering in of the age of video phones. Not only can our laptop or desktop computers now serve as personal telephones, but the omnipresence of various PDA’s means that portable video phoning will soon become the norm.

I remember seeing Back to the Future II in 1990, a movie that predicted a future world where suburbs constructed during the nineteen-eighties would become ghettos, video phones would be in every home (even the homes of poor and working class stiffs), and the trend would be for kids to wear their pants with the pockets turned inside-out.

We may not have 3-D jumbotrons or flying skateboards yet, and the flux capacitor might be in the same realm of fantasy as dildos growing hunky bodies and coming to life, but that movie does gets some things right. Just as Jules Verne imagined submarines while writing Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in the mid-19th-Century, Back to the Future II grabs ahold of our amenity-driven desires to transcend and connect across the boundaries of our limited physical worlds.

I read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1997, and my reading of the classic was made all the more visceral by the fact that I read the first half of the book during the down time of a whale watch trip in Boston Harbor. I recall Captain Nemo’s contraption taking its crew into the black depths of the sea upon which some type of dorsal lamp would light up the underwater world around them. An observation room inside the sub that also served as a study and library for the mysterious captain protected a special vantage point – from the outside forces of pressure, drowning and being eaten by ocean predators – with a thick pane of glass. From here, the narrator of the adventure takes pains to list every possible swimming and floating thing he sees – almost to the point of putting the reader to sleep.

Back to the Future II follows the same path as many science-fiction narratives: it portrays a world made easier (or in some cases harder) by imagined technologies, and then proceeds to explore the moral implications of these technologies on this new and hypothetical world through the actions of different characters in various scenarios. In Back to the Future II, Marty McFly Jr., a scion of the trilogy’s protagonist (played by Michael J. Fox), is a weaker version of his father. He lives in what could be any upper-middle-class 1990 California subdivision – let us say Rocklin, CA, because that is fairly close to home for this author - except the junior McFly’s future neighborhood is not a safe place for one to walk their dog after dusk (dogs in the movie are walked at night by humanless, electronic floating leashes). Despite the supposed working class status of the younger McFly, his home has all the fun amenities that any late-80’s/early-90’s teen can dream of. Besides the TV that also functions as a video phone, the future McFly domicile has (among other things) a device that can cook a pizza in under two seconds, and a toilet paper dispenser in the bathroom that doubles as a mini fax machine.

In contrast to the family’s domestic appearance of financial stability and comfort, the McFly’s are nearly broke. This is evident in the way the beleaguered junior McFly (also played by Fox) sags under the weight of a life that threatens to come crumbling down atop of him at any moment. In a telling scene which displays the younger McFly’s utter lack of assertiveness, a bullying co-worker and lifelong nemesis dares McFly via video phone to make some type of business transaction that is apparently dubious yet by the co-worker’s assurance “un-traceable.” Interrupting Marty McFly Jr.’s evening world news watching is the grinning face of his lifelong foe Biff Tannen Jr. Knowing not to trust Tannen, McFly makes the transaction after being called a “chicken” (nobody calls a McFly a chicken) and then watches the numbers of his already meager net worth roll back on the TV screen to zero. “Ouch,” says Biff – or something similar to “ouch” (I’m paraphrasing here) – “It looks like you just lost a lot of money.” (The scene, by the way, is very reminiscent of the insider trading debacle of the late 80’s captured so well in movies like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.)

As soon as Biff signs off of the video phone, McFly’s boss calls demanding to know why an illegal transaction was just made. “You’re fired,” the boss booms at McFly. Not that hearing this phrase wouldn’t send anybody reeling, but these words are made worse by the fact that the younger Marty can actually see his boss and his boss can see him. The real-time conveyance of the boss’ angry facial expressions, the freshet of blood on McFly’s white cheeks betraying his guilt and embarrassment, and the afterglow of the whittling and smug Tannen still silhouetted in the TV pixels - all of these things paint a dark picture of video phoning.

The intrusion quality of McFly’s TV/video phone in this scene is reflective of its evil. The bullying Biff Tannen is a formidable force for Marty to deal with in person, which makes having a face-to-face video chat with him all the more unbearable and destructive. Seeing the face of a bully on your TV screen is a horror that nobody should have to live with. Half of Biff’s guileful persuasiveness, as displayed in the acting by Thomas Wilson, is in his facial expressions and body language. Biff’s grins and glinting eyes convey his true intention to cause deception and hurt, but it is also these signals that might make a weaker person like Marty McFly Jr. give in to Biff’s dares and taunts in a way that will lead to bad consequences.

The intrusive quality of the boss’ interception of the Biff-Marty phone call/transaction is representative of another evil aspect of video phoning – it’s draconian aspect. How would it feel to be downloading My Little Pony videos on your computer and suddenly see your boss’ face appear on the screen in an upper right hand corner inset? I can’t think of why a boss would need to pop in and say hello. Maybe he just wants to remind you that you are working tomorrow for another co-worker who is having a prenatal exam. Or maybe he heard about a little spat between you and a customer, and since he didn’t have time to lecture you about it before he went home, he is interrupting your sacred My Little Pony time at home. Either way, it would seem a bit intrusive to have an employer contact an employee in this way while he or she is at home relaxing.

Here is another scenario: Imagine receiving a video phone call from your boss when he thinks you are on a business trip in Albany. You are in fact in Albany, but the only business you are doing there involves a hotel room, an attractive state worker you met online, and a bottle of Johnson & Johnson’s baby oil. Imagine answering the phone and seeing your boss’ startled expression. You ask him what’s up but he just stares at you. Finally he says, “Why is your shirt off?” It is at this point you realize that he can not only hear your voice, but he can also see you. He can see your chest hairs glistening with beads of sweat, he can see the heavy rising and falling of your breathing, and he can see the exasperated look of post-coital satisfaction on your face. It is at this point that your brain lets out a long OPPS and you struggle to compose yourself and think of a quick excuse for your sweaty nakedness. This scenario would be disastrous to say the least, and it would blow any notions that we can ever get away with anything ever again out of the water.

To be bullied, spied upon by big brother, sold to, hit on, solicited, or just plain bothered in any usual way by our friends in their stained t-shirted glory – is this where we are headed next? It’s funny. I admit, when I watched Back to the Future II all those years ago, I yearned for the day when we would all have video phones in our showers so we could call the boss to tell him we would be running late. But movies often portray people inhabiting lives and worlds that are far closer to perfect than ours actually are. The truth is, I don’t like looking into some people’s faces while conversing with them because, to put it bluntly, I simply don’t like certain people. I’d rather communicate with these people who make me uncomfortable solely through e-mailing or text messages, only because they are often so difficult to be around and tolerate. The possibility that I could talk to some a-hole or b-word on Skype only lessens the chance that I will ever use this medium for anything other than communicating with my closest friends and family members.

Please don’t misunderstand me when I write that I don’t like certain people. I am not an asshole. I am anti-asshole. I HATE assholes. I am like Henry Rollins in that what I hate most is stupidity and stupid people. My vehement dislike of some stupid things and trends might mirror stupidity itself, but I assure you that I am a very friendly and down-to-Earth person.

Where I think video phoning could really take off, however, is in the realm of online dating and social networking. People can falsify a lot of information online, but nobody can fake their appearance or intelligence when using a site like Skype. This would eliminate countless bad dates and wasted trips to St. Louis to meet that special someone who turned out to actually be a disabled felon or a meth addled, homicidal soccer mom. In this way, I think video phoning will help to bridge some of the distant divides and move us closer to something resembling the truth.

For the same reasons I approve of video phoning, however, I also disapprove of it. This is because I like being entrenched in my half-concealed virtual state where it is safe. I am better able to articulate my thoughts, observations and emotions in writing than I am with actual spoken spontaneity, and if this seems like misrepresentation, that is because it is. Writing is a form of subtle lying. If I were to adopt a style of writing that is closer to the way I talk, my everyday personality might be displayed in this medium, but very few of my conscientious meditations and obserations would show through. I’d also be a crap writer.

I am also afraid of video phoning because I think I’m ugly. Although some people (such as women over 50) say I’m cute and adorable, I don’t stand on a level playing field with most of my peers (or at least the peers I am interested in meeting and dating). I’m fat, my head is too big, I have tired eyes, a voice that registers a phantasmagoria of inflections (like a teenager’s voice that has yet to crack), and I have a funny way of losing my train of thought in mid-sentence. This latter idiosyncrasy makes people stare at me as if I’m brain-damaged or suffering from dementia or something. If people talked with me face-to-face on Skype, I’m afraid they might pass me off as a dud or a complete dummy. But as long as I can convey myself through the medium of internet blogging, e-mail, facebook, youtube, twitter, comment sections, and threads, I can come across as smart, quick-witted, informed, highly opinionated and funny.

The topography of Web 2.0 feels as natural as the real world should feel but doesn’t. In real life I am awkward and soft-spoken. I’m often embarrassed and shy, and it usually takes me a bit longer than most to get into it – whatever “it” happens to be. I am also a poor listener. On the computer, however, I often feel like an Internet ninja. I am tight and precise, super cool with expert skills. Like most, I get to be the person I envision myself being online, and this has to count for something. All the stuff that is in my head comes spewing out of me in writing when I’m on the web, but face-to-face I just crumble.

I’VE ALSO BEEN THINKING…

Just like us guys have The Moonlight Bunny Ranch in Nevada and various other legal outlets for our sexual gratification catharsis needs (such as strip clubs, porn and 1-900 phone sex lines), I think there should be hot STD-tested male prostitutes in every major city – for women. And it shouldn’t be a stigma for ladies to visit these fellows either. If your neighbor across the street is too dumb or too much of an asshole to put out, then I see nothing wrong with coughing up a few hundred bucks for an hour every other month with a guy who looks like John Dye (with the tenderness to match).

There and Back Again

IT IS MY impression that when we go on vacation we are swept up in the change of scenery and pace of life of whatever place we happen to be visiting. Removed from our native surroundings and milieus, we take in and try to make sense of so much that is new and different. Everything slows down and becomes more fascinating to our senses. If we remained somewhere on vacation long enough, however, our lives, habits, work ethic, relationships, and problems would eventually catch up to us. The people we see when we’re on vacation might look interesting because their lives appear foreign to ours, but they are probably no different than you or I when we are at home in our own worlds.

Just think – our lives could be somebody else’s idea of a permanent vacation. Impossible as this seems to me, I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard for another person to point out how much I take for granted on a daily basis. The same might be true for you too.

The business of living is basically taking things for granted. Boredom is taking things for granted. It is not a notional concept to believe that we molt our quotidian selves and become somebody more extraordinary when we’re vacationing. I have witnessed enough of my own personal environment-related transformations to make me a true believer of this. One of the reasons vacations stand out in my mind as some of the most memorably special times of my life is because I’m never bored when I’m on vacation.

***

 

THE AMC series Mad Men is part of the ho-hum business of living. It has its high points – which make the viewer feel like he is riding on a shiny new merry-go-round – but mostly the show has a lot of blah moments that are as monotonous and grey as the long pauses between breaths. I like the aforementioned parenthetical merry-go-round analogy best, however, because of the way it relates to life in general. Initially, a merry-go-round might seem like the most unlikely analogy for anything modern or beautiful, but this is because people often fail to consider the simplicity and disappointment of the contraption. (Cursed merry-go-rounds, rotting and rusting in forgotten playgrounds of times gone past!) By making countless slow or fast revolutions, instead of actually carrying its riders away, a merry-go-round only pretends to take them away.

TV and movies – and shows like Mad Men - only pretend to take us away. They take us to the future, to the past, and to the costumed and air-brushed present. They take us wherever our minds want to go. But, rather unfortunately, they always return us safe and unscathed back to the blahness of boring reality. And oftentimes – most times – we have nothing to show for it. We have no souvenirs or mementos from our trips to outer space. We have no lasting visceral memories and no stories to tell our friends about our adventures and escapades. We never actually rode on the backs of dinosaurs or searched for lost treasure in Africa. We did not propose to our fiancé onboard the Staten Island Ferry at five in the morning, experience the pleasure of a torrid and passionate affair, or suffer through the throes of a shattered marriage. And most of all, we didn’t dodge all those sprays of bullets while beating up so many Korean cocaine smugglers in Tokyo.

 

Merry-go-rounds hold a special fascination for the young, imaginative and playful, but the toy is quickly outgrown. Once the limiting futility of the device is realized, the magic is lost. Whether it is the dreaded anticipation of arriving empty back at the point of embarkation, or whether it is not wanting to suffer another predictable ride that goes around in circles touching all the familiar points and objects of dreams and fantasy – children quickly forgo clambering aboard these creaking, iron machines and instead look to a future that has no answers.

Merry-go-rounds are machines of great wonder and fascination, but what are we to do when the machine stops working for us?

Is Mad Men trying to answer this question? I think the show is trying to answer a lot of life’s questions, and certainly the merry-go-round conundrum would be one of life’s big mysteries. It would seem like the show is trying to answer this question…or at least explore it.

I was on vacation recently, and after a day spent in various touristy clusterfucks, I returned to my hotel room alone and watched an episode of Mad Men. I don’t know why, in the midst of one of the world’s mecas, I found myself longing for this ritual which I normally do when I am at home in my more prosaic surroundings. Like the kid who has recently outgrown the merry-go-round, did I think I could still squeeze something from this ride? Was I expecting to feel something when I watched Mad Men in ________, as if removing the backdrop of my boring lair of a home and city might somehow cause the light to shine differently on the television drama?

I think the merry-go-round phenomenon was really only a way to escape boredom. Just like a time machine seeks to take us to the future or the past, a merry-go-round’s purpose is to fill us with excitement, fascination and wonder. It tries to inject us with that feeling we experience when we’re somewhere on vacation. It attempts to show us a different perspective of the everyday objects we see and it tries to tease out those happy emotions and feelings which are just out of reach to us when we’re in the hazy blur of the mazes that are our everyday lives.

 

But I know the real answer lies in circles and cycles and continuity and loneliness and people trying not to be alone and all that New Age stuff. Whatever…somebody stop this ride already, I think I’m going to piss myself.

Let’s go play on the rocket ship.

Ding! Dong!

Shortly after reading this oops on Wikipedia at 2:45 am Friday morning -

Rush Hudson Limbaugh III (pronounced  /ˈlɪmbɔː/;born January 12, 1951, died December 30, 2009) is an American radio host and conservative political commentator. He is the host of The Rush Limbaugh Show, the highest-rated talk-radio program in the United States. It airs throughout the U.S. on Premiere Radio Networks.

- I turned around and saw this being broadcast from the West Coast on tv.