Payback

Yesterday, I sent the following text message to Persephone:

Two giraffes from the circus or radio city or somewhere flattened by a city garbage truck on madison ave. still happening. One is still alive but they r going to shoot him probably

No response for a few hours, so I sent an IM: "jesus i think i'm just going to go home.  they shot the one that was still alive.  they put up like a shield thing so nobody could see but obv u could hear it."

No reply for a bit, then this conversation ensued:

Persephone: what?
Persephone: shot who?
Steve: see my text?
Persephone: no
Steve: you don't uyse your phone!
Persephone: i just got our of 4 mtgs
Persephone: OMG OMG
Persephone: that is so terrible
Steve: i know
Steve: and so ironic that it happened on april fool's...
Persephone: wait - I was in meetings not ignoring my phone!
Persephone: what were giraffes doing on the street?
Steve: walking from the stables on e34th st

Then I felt that enough was enough and called her and put her out of her misery and wished her a happy April Fool's Day.

So I guess it's fair, cosmically speaking, that I was completely taken in by the story of the new Frank Gehry tower just south of the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan side, an extremely shiny building with many curved surfaces which had set fire to several nearby buildings recently, including the Woolworth Building...

and the hulking and awful Verizon building...

...as well as New York Downtown hospital (not shown).  The full story is here.

I will say in my defense that I caught on before I got to the "Good one April fool!" comments.  (And the scolding, joyless, misguided "Idiotic joke after 9/11" comment, this one by someone called Ortopio.  Let it go, Ortopio: let it go, man.  Nobody cares.)

Anyway.  Oh, and actually, Persephone got me back yesterday too, by telling me that her friend L had just seen a sonogram of her future child and that it had six fingers on one hand, but that they'll just "remove it at birth."  I said that I doubted it was that simple, but  she said that yeah, "that's what they do - they just cut it off soon after the baby is born.  it's like a little nubbin."  She let me go credulously on for a few more minutes and then reminded me what the date was.  (You got me, P: you got me!  I should have been onto you at "nubbin" if not before, but you got me.)

Today's News, Tomorrow

The Times, yesterday, on sale at my local deli in Midtown:

The Times, today, on sale at my local deli in Midtown:

"Mubarak Won't Quit" was (severely) obsolete news by the time I took the first photo yesterday.  "Mubarak Out" is, as far as I know, still accurate.

Always a sign of exciting (or dangerous, or both) times when the paper is out of date within an hour or two of rolling off the press, as it has been three or four times a week for the past several.

(I'm sorry; I don't have anything profound or even interesting to add to this; were you looking for that from me?  Sorry!  Sorry.  Exciting times though, no?)

 

Scumbag

In a cab, just now.  The driver: "Where ya from?"  I told him I grew up in Maine and had lived here for twenty-two years.  I didn't tell him that I was born in D.C. because I didn't think he'd give a shit (in fairness, I barely do).  I didn't think he gave a shit where I was from anyway; he seemed to be doing what cab drivers do sometimes, especially old-school ones, where they feel you out and see if you might be interested in talking about how Jews control everything, or how the "fucking Asians" are ruining New York -- and, also, shouldn't be allowed behind the wheel of a car, ever -- or how Muslims are going to blow up the world.

"Yeah me?  I've been here for sixty-eight years.  Born and raised," he said, and I didn't get a chance to respond because then he told me about how we weren't going to take the FDR to the Brooklyn Bridge because it was a parking lot, so we were going to take the "scenic route," and I fake-laughed at his non-clever turn of phrase and said that was fine.

"Yeah me?  I'm a dinosaur."

"Uh huh," I said.

"I don't actually exist."

"Ha ha, yeah," I said.

"I'd need a cellphone and a fucking turban," he said, referring to the fact that many cab drivers in New York talk on their cellphones while driving, even though it's illegal to drive a taxi and talk on your phone at the same time.  And referring to the fact that we have a lot of Sikh cab drivers here (who, almost to a man, wear turbans).  Although my guess is that it wasn't just Sikhs he had a problem with; that Arabs, Jamaicans, north Africans, sub-Saharan Africans, Haitians, south Asians, east Asians, southeast Asians, and probably Russians and Ukranians were also on his shit list: the immigrants who make up about ninety-nine percent of yellow-cab drivers.

This was where I was supposed to say, "yeah, fuckin' Arabs," or something, and then he and I could talk about how things used to be alright before there were so many non-white people.

I didn't say anything; I pretended to mess with my phone.

But I thought about John Self, Martin Amis's protagonist in his novel Money.  Self -- alcoholic and misanthropic and self-loathing and English and generally miserable -- arrives at JFK  from London and takes a cab to Manhattan.  After careening off the Triborough and onto the FDR and then into the surface streets of East Harlem, his driver gets going on the topic of the large number of "niggers and PRs" to be found in New York, and attempts to draw Self out on this topic.

"Only need about a hundred guys, a hundred guys like me," the driver says, to get rid of all the niggers and PRs.

Self is horribly hung over and doesn't have the energy to do anything but humor his driver: "A hundred guys?  That's not many guys."

"They think, you know," says the driver, "you drive a yellow cab, you must be some kind of a scumbag."

The irony is, perhaps, too much for Self, even in his weakened state: he sighs and leans forward and says, "You know something?  You really are a scumbag.  I thought it was just a swearword until you came along.  You're the first real one I've met."

How To Determine Whether or Not Your Child Is an Owner of One or More Handguns and/or Bullets and/or Is an Abuser of Pot and/or Coke and/or Crack and/or All of the Above

New York State Senator Eric Adams (whose daughter is apparently the most delinquent juvenile in the history of the world) explains some of the finer points.  Remember, inspect what you expect.  If you forget that, you're fucked.

 

 

New York Is a Tough, Tough Place; Not Everyone Makes It.

Winter is especially difficult.

4:23 PM, Driggs and North 10th, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

When I Miss My Dad

When I miss my dad: well, all the time, of course, in a generalized way.  But there are specific situations when I miss him more acutely: when I've just finished a trip from Maine to New York City and want to talk to someone about the merits of the Merritt; around Thanksgiving, which was when, in 1966, he met my mom in Seattle, that first meeting documented on eight-millimeter film by his dear friend Bill Dougall in such a way that I can see myself, in the form of twinkles in the eyes of both of my future parents; when I look at old photos of him like this one taken in 1946 when he was still on active duty in the U.S. Navy, his wonderful life ahead of him; when I recall how his signature brand of blasphemy could make a protestant minister happier than he had been directly prior to the blaspheming.

I missed him again this morning when I was reading the Daily Beast's round-up of videos of famous and/or infamous moments from past State of the Union addresses.  If you've watched a few State of the Union speeches, you know that there's a certain amount of ritual and tradition involved, and that among the traditions is this: that the Speaker of the House sits behind the President and to his left, and that the Vice President, in his role of President of the Senate, sits behind him and to his right.

So, I'm looking at all of these videos, and recognizing then-V.P. George H.W. Bush and Speaker Tip O'Neill standing behind President Reagan as he speaks of the Soviet menace during his first SOTU address.  And there are Al Gore and Newt Gingrich standing behind President Clinton in 1995 as he addresses the new reality of the Republican Revolution.

But then there's Kennedy, in 1963, his last State of the Union although nobody knew that, with Johnson to his right (our left) and...  Hmm, and some super-old dude who must have been the Speaker of the House in 1963.  I have no idea who this is.

Were it January of 2010, not January of 2011, I'd have picked up the phone and called my dad and asked him.  He'd have been having his morning coffee and looking forward to his day (typical day: going swimming at the pool in Ellsworth later in the morning; stopping by the Consolidated School in the afternoon to check out the apple trees planted by grade-schoolers a few years ago as part of a program he'd gotten off the ground; Planning Board in the evening).  I could ask my dad anything, and even though I'd have been forty-one years old at this time last year, I'd have asked him -- in a squeaky, prepubescent voice despite then being forty-one years old, or that's how I "remember" asking him this question which I never asked him -- "Hey, Dad, I'm lookin' at this video of Kennedy's last State of the Union, and there's this white-haired guy who was the Speaker then, in '63; who would thatta bin, Pop?"

Alright, I didn't call him Pop (although he would sometimes leave me phone messages saying, "Hey, Steve, it's your pop," and I miss those messages).  But: squeaky, squeaky: no idea why I remember these conversations with my dad like this; I'm reasonably sure I asked such questions normal-style, in my normal baritone voice, without the Leave It to Beaver inflections.  But in our lives (or mine, anyway), there are generally only a few people whom one can ask questions which might seem like stupid (or just irrelevant, or annoying) questions if asked of anyone else, and of course my dad was one of those people for me.

And my dad would have said, "Ohhhhh, sixty-threeeeeeee, well that would have been... suuuure, that would have been ______!...  Now wait, would it?  Yes, had to have been ____;  he'd been ______ in the _____, and then he'd ____."

Question answered.  Although I could have gotten the answer just as easily from Wikipedia, but these sorts of questions were an excuse to call my mom and dad (not that I needed an excuse really, because I was never at a loss for things to talk to my dad about, or questions to ask him, or he of me for that matter, such as how to make "the small... I don't know how to describe it: the small photograph of the printer on my desktop seems to have gone away" -- i.e., he couldn't make his computer print anymore).

But Wikipedia isn't the same!  It's just not the same.

Btw, the super-old dude who was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in 1963, by the way, Wikipedia sez, was John William McCormack -- ever heard of him?  Of Massachusetts?  I haven't; not sure if I should have.  He was only seventy-two in 1963.  I guess people looked older then.

Classic Drudge

Have a look, please, at this, currently the top story on the Drudge Report:

A state dinner for a Communist leader?  Which commie?  Castro?  Or... like Stalin or Khruschchev?  (Except those guys are dead.  Same with Chairman Mao: dead.  Lenin too.)  Kim Jong-il, perhaps?  He's almost dead, but not quite.

Well, no.  No, the "Communist leader" is of course Hu Jintao, the current President of China.

And Drudge speaks the truth, as far as it goes: Obama will host a state dinner for Hu Jintao, who is the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China.  (And presumably a "lavish" one: aren't they always lavish?  Does the White House do state dinners where McDonald's is ordered in, or pizza, or for that matter, Chinese?)

But Drudge knows that he's obfuscating rather than doing what journalists at least claim to try to do (clarify).  If he were a clarifier, not an obfuscator, his headline would have been something like "Obama Gives Chinese Leader Lavish State Dinner" -- something with the word "China" or "Chinese" in it, because the pertinent thing about Hu Jintao is that he's Chinese, not that he's a Communist.  (Or even the actual headline of the actual story in the Guardian, which is "Hu Jintao Set for Lavish White House Reception on State Visit" -- and by the way, why is Drudge relying for his news on a leftie rag like the Guardian?  Isn't the Guardian a prominent member of the "MSM" which the right so loathes?  Drudge often links to the Times and the Washington Post and CNN and similar terrorist-hugging/gay/latte-oriented MSM organs too.  Weird: whatever.)

But something like "Obama Gives Chinese Leader Lavish State Dinner" wouldn't have been sufficiently inflammatory or vaguely deceptive enough for Drudge.

Yes, Matt: China is a Communist nation, or a "Communist" one, anyway.  It's the most capitalism-embracing Communist nation in history:  Marx would surely blush.  And most people, including most conservative commentators, would not, if asked to describe China in one sentence, say, "well, it's a Communist country."  (The word "communist" doesn't appear in the Guardian article which Drudge links to.)  The fact that China's ruling party is called the "Communist Party" is sort of a curiosity.  And you know this.  Which makes your infraction worse, but you know that too.  What you do, though, is defend yourself by noting that you are only reporting the truth.  Sort of like "McCain to Debate Black Man on Issues Facing Nation" would, in the autumn of 2008, have been "true" too, although even you didn't sink that low.

This isn't to say that there isn't room to comment on the fact of a state visit from the leader of our "frienemy" China (remember the three months in the middle of the last decade when that word sounded clever?).  But why is it that I suspect the recent University of Maryland study (the one showing that the more Fox News one consumes, the less well informed one becomes) would very likely apply to your not-super-smart-and-not-super-well-informed readers as well?

Oh and by the way, President Bush had Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao's direct predecessor, down to the ranch in 2002, but I don't need to check the Wayback Machine to be pretty sure that you "reported" that story differently; that your headline was not "Bush Hosts Communist Leader at Crawford Ranch."  I point this out, Matt, because you love "reporting" on what you see as -- and what sometimes even is -- liberal or Democratic hypocrisy.  So I thought you might get a kick out of my observation.

True Grit

I stepped onto the uptown number 6 train this morning at Union Square.  It smelled as if someone had, last week, stitched shut the anus and penis of a male goat or pig or moose, preventing him from urinating or evacuating his bowels, and then, this morning, removed the stitches, right there on the uptown local, with achingly predictable results.

A homeless woman sat at my end of the subway car.  What she'd done was, she'd urinated up and down the length of the car, and then sat down.  She had a contented look on her face.  A satisfied look, with a touch of, "yeah, you cocksuckers, I just pissed all over my fucking self and the fucking subway; deal with it" look.  At 23rd Street, transit cops boarded the car and removed her from it as she screamed unintelligible things at them and/or the world in the voice of a very angry bobcat.

I am tired of people who complain that New York lacks the "grit" it used to have, as if this former grit lent the city some sort of "authenticity" which it now lacks.  It's true that smashed windshield glass on the sidewalk and crack whores on Park Avenue South and gunpoint hold-ups in Times Square are a thing of the past (and perhaps of the future, but not of the present); some people would argue that these are positive developments.  But for better or for worse, and even here in reportedly "sanitized" Manhattan, we still have plenty of "authenticity."

Memo from Building Management

From the property manager of the office building where I work:

Please be advised that the commencement of the Lobby Renovation Project which was scheduled to begin on the evening of Friday October 29, 2010 is postponed until further notice.

I believe the property manager of my building isn't making enough of an effort to sound like an Important Person, and therefore that he risks not being taken seriously by the tenants of my building.  It seems to me that something like this might be more appropriate:

It is hereby stated by Building Management to the collective Tenant Entities of XXX Park Avenue South and subtenants thereto as regards the heretofore planned commencement event of the First Floor Lobby Renovation Project, that said commencement will no longer commence -- as presently anticipated by all parties commencing the Tenants of said Building -- at the time denoted by 2300 hours Greenwich Mean Time on October the 29th, 2010 A.D. as identified regarding the Gregorian calendar in common use in the current era, on account of a superceding Postponement Decision with regards to the anticipated commencement of the abovementioned Event, said commencement Date and Time until further notice to be subject to said Postponement regarding when in the future months and/or years it starts on.

That's how I would have written that shit.

Hypothetical Conversation between Me and My Dad

Here's the conversation I would have had with my dad this morning, if he hadn't died last week:

Me: "Hi Dad!"

Dad: "Hey, old man!  You're all safe back in New York?"

Me: "Yeah, got in just before two last night.  Made it in just under nine hours!  Eight hours and fifty-nine minutes, actually."

Dad: "My God, you're a wild man."

Me: "Yeah, I dunno, Google Maps says it should take eight hours and thirty-two minutes, but they've never been stuck behind a slow truck on Route 3."  (My dad probably wouldn't have had much of a response to that; he didn't mind getting stuck behind a slow truck on Route 3, or any route, because he liked to drive 45 or 50, and not just in his old age.)  "Ten hours door to door, I usually think, with, you know, moderate traffic.  Although, I didn't take Route 3."

Dad: "Really?"

Me: "No-went-through-Bangor."

Dad: "But that adds a good fifteen, twenty miles."  (You get to the Interstate much more quickly if you go via Bangor, you see.  We've discussed the pros and cons of going through Bangor, as opposed to taking Route 3 to Augusta, for at least fifteen years -- since around the time I figured out that my dad, wiser than I in many ways, nonetheless didn't necessarily know the best routes to take from one place to another, even though he was my dad.  Anyway, I always approached this Bangor-vs-Route-3 issue as if it were a new topic that we could bat around.)

Me: "Yeah, I know.  Took the River Road.  There's all the construction on 1A this summer.  And I don't like 46; it gives me the creeps."  (Route 46 is borderline Deliverance territory.  That's no fair, actually: it's just not a nice drive, and you feel like you're in the middle of nowhere, even by Maine standards.)

Dad: "Well, that's grand -- any traffic around Boston?  I suppose not; must have been nine thirty..."

Me: "...Right, yeah, a little near Worcester and Hartford, nothing big.  I did pick up the Wilbur Cross sooner off of 91 than I have before.  Nice to get away from the trucks a little sooner, and you can still make good time."

Dad: "Now... The Wilbur Cross just becomes the Merritt, doesn't it?"

Me: "Yeah.  I'm not sure where it happens.  Some town line, I guess.  Then over to the Saw Mill on --"

Dad: "Ooooooooh!  So you do it that way even if you're going to Brooklyn?"

Me: "Sure; otherwise you'd have to -- I don't know, go over the Whitestone or something into Queens, then down the... something, I dunno; it'd be an ugly drive, anyway.  Coming in in the West Side, though, it works better if you cut over to the East Side like you were taking 95, except that you don't; you get off and zip down the FDR.  Better than West Side Highway traffic (unless it's rush hour cuz things can get snarled up there)...  Hey, Dad?  What's the thing about the Mosholu Parkway?  The poem or something?  'My moon over Mosholu Parkway?'  I always think of it when I come into the city that way, cuz you go under it..."

Dad: "Oh!  Ahhhh, well... Perelman, S.J. Perelman.  'You're a double-malted with two scoops of whipped cream; you're the moon rising over the Mosholu Parkway'..."

Me: "Oh, right...  Who was he, Perelman?"

...Christ, you're not asleep?  I commend you on your stamina.  Perhaps you've had a lot of coffee.  Perhaps you kept reading because you thought something substantial would eventually be discussed.  Yeah, sorry.  Because that really could have been a Steve-and-Dad conversation -- although we would have switched it up after a bit and talked about Obama, or how we both regretted that we'd been cautiously in favor of the Iraq war, or Seinfeld, or how the internet worked.

But so my question is, who the fuck am I going to have that conversation with now?  That stuff -- where the Wilbur Cross Parkway turns into the Merritt Parkway, for God's sake -- was stuff which my dad and I found interesting.  Seriously!  Go figure.

I was, in fact, on the Merritt near Greenwich last night when I realized that I'd made really good time to New York from Maine, and I thought about how I'd tell my dad about the good time I'd made, but quickly realized that I wouldn't be telling him about it at all, ever.