But sort of, and only in a manner that gives me an excuse to rage against pollution in general and then specifically against the way the Magilla from Wasilla emits pollution like a garbage truck in need of a ring job.
Sarah says global warming is real, but we can't necessarily pin it on man-made causes. I agree. The fact is, we cannot know. The earth is a big, old place and it has had ice-ages and Devonian heat-waves in its own seemingly whimsical Can't-Fool-Mother-Nature way for about four billion years. If the temperature generally rises 3 degrees and causes the ice caps to melt, it may be a disaster for us but for the Earth (or Gaia if you must), it's not much more than the feeling you'd get if you broke a sweat trying to catch the bus.
That said, I see no connection whatever between the argument that the earth is/is not warming because of us, and the real outrage that ought to be inspired by the multi-stage environmental disasters we know we are causing, and which are at best depressing and often enough mind-blowing in their rank awfulness.
Sure, Gaia doesn't care whether the Siberian Tiger makes it to the year 2050. But I do. And I know we are causing it to die off because we keep cutting down its forested habitat. Of course we can't know if Antarctica is turning into a palm-fronded paradise because of us. But we do know that the Amazon is getting burned down, and that sludge in the water is killing children there, and that wonderful new species of plants and animals are being discovered there only as they are being destroyed in a sickening quest for cheaper burger-beef (even though I love The King of BK fame).
It may be true that Al Gore is Chicken Little. I never thought he was brilliant (he never seemed bright compared to Clinton, anyway), nor that he really had made a convincing case just because he knew how to use scary pictures in a pedantic manner. But to me, Global Warming isn't the point. The genuine tragedy is the destruction of habitat and species that we KNOW is our fault.
Make no mistake: of course we need to survive as a species--we claim that right and I support it and even support species bigotry because that's as natural as a lion's quest for breakfast. But I don't support wanton destruction of beautiful, complex natural habitats only to replace them with crude dwellings and cheap crap amusements and dimwitted, potbellied nincompoops complaining the Liberals are out to get them and that Sarah Palin's their six-pack-totin' gal. No.
And in a further note on this woman's eternal gift for glaring tackiness, let us briefly review the crude manner in which she blotted out the name of the Man Who Made Her Queen on the silly sun visor she was wearing at the beach in the State That Had Too Many Hawaiians while wearing a vapid, vituperative shirt that said "If You Don't Love America, Why Don't You Get the Hell Out"?
To which I would answer: Sarah, you are not America. You actually don't love the real America--the multi-racial, multi-cultural one that exists today. So why don't you get the hell out? Alaska would be far enough, and keep your stupid mouth shut while you're at it.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
One Hundred Years Ago. . .
. . .your great grandparents were in their prime (do you know who their parents were? and isn't it bone-chilling to realize you may not, and that your own full, passionate life may be subject to the same oblivion but a hundred years hence?).
Please read on, fellow mortal.
Your great grandparents, probably without understanding exactly why, were standing at the portals of a momentous period we have come to call "The American Century". That century has come to an end. The 21st got started with awful news from Dade County and then worse news from the corner of Liberty and Church in Lower Manhattan, followed by even worse news a couple of blocks south at the corner of Wall and Broad just across from where a certain American General was sworn in as the nation's first Commander in Chief. Obama may be President today, but he's inherited a deflated-balloon of a nation hissing out its remaining air in a way that sounds an awful lot like the mindless drone of tea-baggers and other ill-tempered opponents to common-sense.
But hope cannot be lost if we look back on what was going on a hundred years ago, when the prospects for the nation loomed great, but when the United States, culturally at least, was unsound and notably laggard--perhaps much as it is today.
Here are a few examples of what made the papers (ref: "America's Taste 1859 -1959, NYT Books):
1908: New York Camera Club Ousts Alfred Steiglitz
They accused him of malfeasance but he said the reason was they just objected to his realism. They called him and his followers "the Mop and Pail crew", mocking their penchant for photographing the city's streets and its people. For quite some time, cubism's forward-looking works on canvas could be seen only at Steiglitz' New York Studio. Incidentally, Picasso's earth-shaking "Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon" with its distorted monstrous nude ladies with African masks was revealed to a generally horrified public in 1906.
1906: Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" is panned by the critics but becomes a best-seller anyway.
"I aimed for America's heart and hit it in the stomach" said Sinclair (who also authored "Oil!" upon which the Daniel Day-Lewis vehicle "There Will Be Blood" was based). For those who don't know, "The Jungle" is a novel about labor injustice and woefully poor hygiene in the meatpacking industry. Apparently the latter descriptions were so disgusting that the public grew outraged and soon insisted upon, and got, the US government to inspect food processing and keep it at least effectively clean enough not to sicken any noticeable percentage of those who partook. Sinclair had in addition hoped to spur similar outrage at the labor malfeasance thereat, but as any Mexican working in a chicken-parts factory knows, this part of the outrage never became as popular with a feasting American public.
1903: Carrie A. Nation is jailed.
Her axe-wielding quote: "You have taken me in as a lamb but I shall come out as a lion". And thus was born the movement that would eventually become an ignominious chapter in our history known as Prohibition; and concomitantly we'd see the rise of a ruling class of Gangsters in America. What Carrie couldn't understand was that you can't stop people from ingesting what they want (see above) no matter what method with which you regale them or punish them. Carrie A. Nation, an Oklahoma girl, had in her later years decided, it seems, that Demon Alcohol was the ruin of lives and families and that alcohol-bars must be cut up with axes. She may have had a point. But it is a little known fact that she was equally and as vociferously against "fraternal orders" such as the Masons, the Odd-Fellows, and probably, if they had existed, Ralph Kramden's Raccoon Club. One imagines these groups were far more influential then than now--or perhaps we just don't realize what they are up to these days (Skull and Bones anyone?). I know I haven't a clue. Having discovered this latter nugget of information, I must admit, is forcing me to give old Carrie a second look.
Finally, and this is about inflation:
1909: Holbein Portrait sells for $400,000--a scandalous sum for a painting at the time.
Now of course we would be well into the multi-millions for same. Fifty million? Maybe. But $400,000! Today you might get a weatherbeaten Manhattan co-op with a view of the air shaft for that much, provided you could convince the bank you really didn't need the money in which case they would guardedly lend it to you (still owing all that TARP money to the government).
So, while we might still be driving the bus in the ditch, we can safely consider ourselves well ahead of our great grandparents in some ways. For instance, there is no chance they carried around supercomputers in their pockets. Nor would they have been lucky enough to be able to argue about universal health care (in an age when "dropsy" was a significant ailment).
In any case, why is everyone so excited about any of these? A hundred years from now it will all seem so quaint.
Please read on, fellow mortal.
Your great grandparents, probably without understanding exactly why, were standing at the portals of a momentous period we have come to call "The American Century". That century has come to an end. The 21st got started with awful news from Dade County and then worse news from the corner of Liberty and Church in Lower Manhattan, followed by even worse news a couple of blocks south at the corner of Wall and Broad just across from where a certain American General was sworn in as the nation's first Commander in Chief. Obama may be President today, but he's inherited a deflated-balloon of a nation hissing out its remaining air in a way that sounds an awful lot like the mindless drone of tea-baggers and other ill-tempered opponents to common-sense.
But hope cannot be lost if we look back on what was going on a hundred years ago, when the prospects for the nation loomed great, but when the United States, culturally at least, was unsound and notably laggard--perhaps much as it is today.
Here are a few examples of what made the papers (ref: "America's Taste 1859 -1959, NYT Books):
1908: New York Camera Club Ousts Alfred Steiglitz
They accused him of malfeasance but he said the reason was they just objected to his realism. They called him and his followers "the Mop and Pail crew", mocking their penchant for photographing the city's streets and its people. For quite some time, cubism's forward-looking works on canvas could be seen only at Steiglitz' New York Studio. Incidentally, Picasso's earth-shaking "Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon" with its distorted monstrous nude ladies with African masks was revealed to a generally horrified public in 1906.
1906: Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" is panned by the critics but becomes a best-seller anyway.
"I aimed for America's heart and hit it in the stomach" said Sinclair (who also authored "Oil!" upon which the Daniel Day-Lewis vehicle "There Will Be Blood" was based). For those who don't know, "The Jungle" is a novel about labor injustice and woefully poor hygiene in the meatpacking industry. Apparently the latter descriptions were so disgusting that the public grew outraged and soon insisted upon, and got, the US government to inspect food processing and keep it at least effectively clean enough not to sicken any noticeable percentage of those who partook. Sinclair had in addition hoped to spur similar outrage at the labor malfeasance thereat, but as any Mexican working in a chicken-parts factory knows, this part of the outrage never became as popular with a feasting American public.
1903: Carrie A. Nation is jailed.
Her axe-wielding quote: "You have taken me in as a lamb but I shall come out as a lion". And thus was born the movement that would eventually become an ignominious chapter in our history known as Prohibition; and concomitantly we'd see the rise of a ruling class of Gangsters in America. What Carrie couldn't understand was that you can't stop people from ingesting what they want (see above) no matter what method with which you regale them or punish them. Carrie A. Nation, an Oklahoma girl, had in her later years decided, it seems, that Demon Alcohol was the ruin of lives and families and that alcohol-bars must be cut up with axes. She may have had a point. But it is a little known fact that she was equally and as vociferously against "fraternal orders" such as the Masons, the Odd-Fellows, and probably, if they had existed, Ralph Kramden's Raccoon Club. One imagines these groups were far more influential then than now--or perhaps we just don't realize what they are up to these days (Skull and Bones anyone?). I know I haven't a clue. Having discovered this latter nugget of information, I must admit, is forcing me to give old Carrie a second look.
Finally, and this is about inflation:
1909: Holbein Portrait sells for $400,000--a scandalous sum for a painting at the time.
Now of course we would be well into the multi-millions for same. Fifty million? Maybe. But $400,000! Today you might get a weatherbeaten Manhattan co-op with a view of the air shaft for that much, provided you could convince the bank you really didn't need the money in which case they would guardedly lend it to you (still owing all that TARP money to the government).
So, while we might still be driving the bus in the ditch, we can safely consider ourselves well ahead of our great grandparents in some ways. For instance, there is no chance they carried around supercomputers in their pockets. Nor would they have been lucky enough to be able to argue about universal health care (in an age when "dropsy" was a significant ailment).
In any case, why is everyone so excited about any of these? A hundred years from now it will all seem so quaint.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Full of Monsters
In a recent article in the New York Times, the excellent columnist Olivia Judson (an evolutionary biologist) noted:
". . .there’s no need to invent monsters: you just need to imagine how terrifying it would be if ants were the size of rhinos."
I would like to shout "huzzah" to this and add to the sentiment. My personal belief has long been that the imagination of monsters natural, supernatural and alien springs from the unwieldy, even somewhat catastrophic knowledge the race of humans secretly owns about the near-unimaginable strangeness of thousands of our fellow species here on earth.
Specifically I would like to point out that if one were to spend half an hour looking at any book with close up photographs of common insects, one would have to be convinced that we are living in a world literally crawling with bizarre monsters that feature as much oddity as any we might ever find on any distant planet in our supposed interplanetary future.
Can we hope (or fear) to discover anything anywhere that will be as weird or as creepy as the type of fly that buries its young in the throat of a living deer, and in which its young multiply and fatten, only to fly eventually out of the deer's mouth having mostly destroyed the deer's ability to swallow (leaving it for dead)? Or how about those worms that get into people's eyes and grow gigantic and then slither out of the corners of the poor host's eyes when they feel a need to move on to the next nefarious stage of their squirming, alien existence?
Indeed, review the heads of insects close up with their giant multifaceted eyes and their merciless cutting jaws and read some about their entirely shocking antics--you'll come away shivering with horror; and it will be made worse to know these tiny wretches are currently in the business of making up the majority of the earth's biomass (or perhaps you will fall in love with the little creeps and become a candidate entomologist).
Further, I believe our collective subconscious (let's assume for a moment Jung had a point) registers all this and agrees that we are better served by inventing fantastic versions of these biological realities than by learning in depth about the reality of their biology. This is because, by projecting them out as fantasies, we can put them collectively at a distance and claim they're certainly terrifying but not "real"; and when it comes to science fiction and the hunt for alien life we can even project that they are "far away"; all more comforting fodder than to spend time thinking about the motes in your own eye right now; or the microscopic bugs that infest your pillow (dust mites) that, when blown up to poster size outclass in awfulness the most awful fantasies ever churned out by Hollywood or even folklore.
Ms. Judson's article was partly about the coming Year of Biodiversity and she calls for a "Wild Celebration" of same and I suppose therefore it may be the wrong time for me to be carping about the horror inspired in me by so many of our fellow bio-travelers on this planet (especially the very small ones) stocked so richly with biological wonders.
In any case I certainly hope we never discover any outer-space-creature weirder than any typical insect already on this planet. I don't think I will be able to stand it.
". . .there’s no need to invent monsters: you just need to imagine how terrifying it would be if ants were the size of rhinos."
I would like to shout "huzzah" to this and add to the sentiment. My personal belief has long been that the imagination of monsters natural, supernatural and alien springs from the unwieldy, even somewhat catastrophic knowledge the race of humans secretly owns about the near-unimaginable strangeness of thousands of our fellow species here on earth.
Specifically I would like to point out that if one were to spend half an hour looking at any book with close up photographs of common insects, one would have to be convinced that we are living in a world literally crawling with bizarre monsters that feature as much oddity as any we might ever find on any distant planet in our supposed interplanetary future.
Can we hope (or fear) to discover anything anywhere that will be as weird or as creepy as the type of fly that buries its young in the throat of a living deer, and in which its young multiply and fatten, only to fly eventually out of the deer's mouth having mostly destroyed the deer's ability to swallow (leaving it for dead)? Or how about those worms that get into people's eyes and grow gigantic and then slither out of the corners of the poor host's eyes when they feel a need to move on to the next nefarious stage of their squirming, alien existence?
Indeed, review the heads of insects close up with their giant multifaceted eyes and their merciless cutting jaws and read some about their entirely shocking antics--you'll come away shivering with horror; and it will be made worse to know these tiny wretches are currently in the business of making up the majority of the earth's biomass (or perhaps you will fall in love with the little creeps and become a candidate entomologist).
Further, I believe our collective subconscious (let's assume for a moment Jung had a point) registers all this and agrees that we are better served by inventing fantastic versions of these biological realities than by learning in depth about the reality of their biology. This is because, by projecting them out as fantasies, we can put them collectively at a distance and claim they're certainly terrifying but not "real"; and when it comes to science fiction and the hunt for alien life we can even project that they are "far away"; all more comforting fodder than to spend time thinking about the motes in your own eye right now; or the microscopic bugs that infest your pillow (dust mites) that, when blown up to poster size outclass in awfulness the most awful fantasies ever churned out by Hollywood or even folklore.
Ms. Judson's article was partly about the coming Year of Biodiversity and she calls for a "Wild Celebration" of same and I suppose therefore it may be the wrong time for me to be carping about the horror inspired in me by so many of our fellow bio-travelers on this planet (especially the very small ones) stocked so richly with biological wonders.
In any case I certainly hope we never discover any outer-space-creature weirder than any typical insect already on this planet. I don't think I will be able to stand it.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
OMG It's a Winter Wonderland
Who knew that a longtime Christmas-disliker could have his heart warmed by the snowy, unprepossessing Yule celebrations of a small town on a bluff above the mighty Hudson closer the the Capital than the City?
It happened last night.
The small town--a very, very tiny City in fact--had its annual Christmas Walk last night and nature obliged by lofting great big white flakes down upon the longish Main Street throughout the event, lending it an air of postcardlike perfection. But this small town, this very tiny city, is not just a bypassed burg full of hicks and nincompoops. No, it happens to contain a fair amount of progressives, certified members of the intelligentsia, hip refugees from senseless high rent, and quirky Hudson Valley operatives who've been strumming against the machine for decades.
So the celebration was a happy mix of Santa and odes to the more ancient, more Pagan gods. By this I mean there was not just a teeny tiny parade with Santa sitting atop the back of a Mercedes Benz convertible, but also a dancing Scheherezade in a shopwindow; and in another window, a girl with a dress that had a puppet theater attached to the front of it in which was performed a cloth and stuffing version of the Can-Can. Hot chocolate was served by young folk with multiple piercings; a man walked on stilts and wore a top hat. In the large display window of a pricey mid-century antique store a pair of middle-aged men held forth on fiddle and guitar, one in top hat and tails, the other in a pony-tail almost certainly of Off-the-Pigs vintage (are top hats making a comeback among a certain brand of hipster?) A more traditional hair salon (unforgiveably named "Mane Street") featured a singer of doo-wop and Elvis and gave trinkets to the smaller celebrants.
City Hall had Santa sequestered somewhere warmly inside and the sidewalk was thick with local folks getting their young their rightful meet and greet with the jolly fat man who may well bring them gifts a couple of weeks from now. Bundled brightly in layers of wintry Wal-mart gear, the kids were noticebly asparkle and even the littlest, whom one must assume really had no idea why they were where they were, seemed justifiably amused and many were obviously smitten by the gently falling snow.
There were no chain-store sponsorships nor glad-handing commercial sycophants to mar the small majesty of the tableau.
I bought a handful of old magazines at my favorite store, which seems to be an emporium of all things odd and inexplicable and that plays acid jazz rather loudly, and had some hot chocolate and then went home for dinner. I felt as if, for once, I at least understood why a celebration of the season, well and duly constituted, might be at some point uplifting to a spirit already weary of the dark season upon whose chilly climes we must now embark.
PS there was a hot dog stand that didn't get much business and I think it was the snow. Snow-covered barkers are not much of a draw it would seem. Better that he would sell kettle-corn or elephant-ears or something else already puffy or powdered?
It happened last night.
The small town--a very, very tiny City in fact--had its annual Christmas Walk last night and nature obliged by lofting great big white flakes down upon the longish Main Street throughout the event, lending it an air of postcardlike perfection. But this small town, this very tiny city, is not just a bypassed burg full of hicks and nincompoops. No, it happens to contain a fair amount of progressives, certified members of the intelligentsia, hip refugees from senseless high rent, and quirky Hudson Valley operatives who've been strumming against the machine for decades.
So the celebration was a happy mix of Santa and odes to the more ancient, more Pagan gods. By this I mean there was not just a teeny tiny parade with Santa sitting atop the back of a Mercedes Benz convertible, but also a dancing Scheherezade in a shopwindow; and in another window, a girl with a dress that had a puppet theater attached to the front of it in which was performed a cloth and stuffing version of the Can-Can. Hot chocolate was served by young folk with multiple piercings; a man walked on stilts and wore a top hat. In the large display window of a pricey mid-century antique store a pair of middle-aged men held forth on fiddle and guitar, one in top hat and tails, the other in a pony-tail almost certainly of Off-the-Pigs vintage (are top hats making a comeback among a certain brand of hipster?) A more traditional hair salon (unforgiveably named "Mane Street") featured a singer of doo-wop and Elvis and gave trinkets to the smaller celebrants.
City Hall had Santa sequestered somewhere warmly inside and the sidewalk was thick with local folks getting their young their rightful meet and greet with the jolly fat man who may well bring them gifts a couple of weeks from now. Bundled brightly in layers of wintry Wal-mart gear, the kids were noticebly asparkle and even the littlest, whom one must assume really had no idea why they were where they were, seemed justifiably amused and many were obviously smitten by the gently falling snow.
There were no chain-store sponsorships nor glad-handing commercial sycophants to mar the small majesty of the tableau.
I bought a handful of old magazines at my favorite store, which seems to be an emporium of all things odd and inexplicable and that plays acid jazz rather loudly, and had some hot chocolate and then went home for dinner. I felt as if, for once, I at least understood why a celebration of the season, well and duly constituted, might be at some point uplifting to a spirit already weary of the dark season upon whose chilly climes we must now embark.
PS there was a hot dog stand that didn't get much business and I think it was the snow. Snow-covered barkers are not much of a draw it would seem. Better that he would sell kettle-corn or elephant-ears or something else already puffy or powdered?
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Lost in the Woods Again?
AP--(Oregon)Search on for missing Ore. Christmas tree cutters
C'mon. Really? Really?
I sure hope the diabetic tree-hunter and his non-camper wife get found soon, because they have a couple of kids who are waiting for them to come home.
But really. Is there any way we can convince people to avoid trying the very obviously stupid attractions life can offer? Like, say, carnival games? Or credit card debt at 28% interest? Or going up into the high snowy mountain wilderness hunting for a Christmas tree?
Again, my hopes are riding on those Oregon State helicopters looking for this poor couple. But for heaven's sake, if they get found, they should also be put in stocks in the public square and forced to wear forest-green dunce-caps for at least a full day.
What sort of fatuous impetuosity propelled them to take the family Subaru and go up into the inhospitable snowy wastes of the Cascade Mountains in winter, hoping to find the type of tree associated with pagan Yule celebrations (attached inexplicably to the High Christian Holiday since the Victorian era), but especially the type of tree favored by ancient barbarian Teutons that also happens to grow only at the peaks of wilderness mountains? And especially if one of them were diabetic (one supposes the hunter of exotic trees was also a hunter of Angus Third Pounders)?
I cannot imagine a suitable mindset. Not for a parent. For a loner, or any unattached adult for that matter, fine: go up in the woods, get lost, die if you must, it's your life and your fate alone. But if you've got a couple of kids at home, and you drive off into the wilderness looking for a very temporary living room decoration in the middle of winter, you are probably a perfect idiot. Proof? Here is the proof: last year the same couple got stuck for four hours in the Cascadian Siskiyou forest also looking for a Christmas tree. So this year they figured, why not try it again? And let's hope for their kids' sake they get real lucky again, with the search helicopters burning taxpayer fuel droning on and on and on. . .
On a related note, a recent story in Science News (on line) noted that snowflakes can sometimes be triangular and the microscopic photos of same were, in the true sense of the word, wonderful.
Small comfort for the frostbitten.
Finally, a totally unrelated note. I have noticed that the Google Ads appearing in this blog seem to mistake my mention of Republicans and right wingers for support--and therefore, there seem no small number of ads for Palin's book or donation to the gubernatorial efforts of the Texan Kaye Bailey Hutchinson. No comment.
C'mon. Really? Really?
I sure hope the diabetic tree-hunter and his non-camper wife get found soon, because they have a couple of kids who are waiting for them to come home.
But really. Is there any way we can convince people to avoid trying the very obviously stupid attractions life can offer? Like, say, carnival games? Or credit card debt at 28% interest? Or going up into the high snowy mountain wilderness hunting for a Christmas tree?
Again, my hopes are riding on those Oregon State helicopters looking for this poor couple. But for heaven's sake, if they get found, they should also be put in stocks in the public square and forced to wear forest-green dunce-caps for at least a full day.
What sort of fatuous impetuosity propelled them to take the family Subaru and go up into the inhospitable snowy wastes of the Cascade Mountains in winter, hoping to find the type of tree associated with pagan Yule celebrations (attached inexplicably to the High Christian Holiday since the Victorian era), but especially the type of tree favored by ancient barbarian Teutons that also happens to grow only at the peaks of wilderness mountains? And especially if one of them were diabetic (one supposes the hunter of exotic trees was also a hunter of Angus Third Pounders)?
I cannot imagine a suitable mindset. Not for a parent. For a loner, or any unattached adult for that matter, fine: go up in the woods, get lost, die if you must, it's your life and your fate alone. But if you've got a couple of kids at home, and you drive off into the wilderness looking for a very temporary living room decoration in the middle of winter, you are probably a perfect idiot. Proof? Here is the proof: last year the same couple got stuck for four hours in the Cascadian Siskiyou forest also looking for a Christmas tree. So this year they figured, why not try it again? And let's hope for their kids' sake they get real lucky again, with the search helicopters burning taxpayer fuel droning on and on and on. . .
On a related note, a recent story in Science News (on line) noted that snowflakes can sometimes be triangular and the microscopic photos of same were, in the true sense of the word, wonderful.
Small comfort for the frostbitten.
Finally, a totally unrelated note. I have noticed that the Google Ads appearing in this blog seem to mistake my mention of Republicans and right wingers for support--and therefore, there seem no small number of ads for Palin's book or donation to the gubernatorial efforts of the Texan Kaye Bailey Hutchinson. No comment.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
What's up with the Capital One TV Commercials (NY Area)?
Maybe they customize them for different Metropolitan Statistical Areas, but in my area (NYC) the television ads for a bank called "Capital One" have taken several crazy twists, each one more annoying than the last. They have a separate and equally brazen (and disgusting) set of commercials for their credit cards, on which I shall also comment.
The offending campaign concerns their boasting about how many branches they have. Each branch is represented by a three-story-high red pushpin (like on a map!), except that the pushpin arrives plunging through the lower atmosphere much as would a missile, embedding itself violently in the sidewalk outside of each supposed Capital One branch. My problem is with the violent, transgressive, anti-New York feeling evoked by the sight of giant missiles attacking the city, and perhaps worse, the notion that people will see this (broken sidewalks and all), and instead of fleeing the invasion, go about their business, mildly curious, quite as if they had been hoping, mildly, to see one of these random, dangerous attacks for themselves (there is an element of terrorism as well as an element of unseemly voyeurism to it, in my opinion). In an especially baffling twist, there is even a giant pushpin that smashes into and pins a taxi to the ground, while an Islamic-looking driver gets out and seems dismayed that his taxi has been utterly destroyed. His reaction is as if someone had spilled Kool-Aid on the hood.
Lately the campaign has morphed into something truly monstrous. Now the giant destructive pushpins are simply part of the city landscape--giant, red alien presences blocking sidewalks--and cityfolk have adopted them as the kind of sorta-fun, only-in-NY semi-nuisances that get accepted as part of the diverse urban landscape (like counterfeit handbag hawkers?--rogue shish-kebab vendors?). Children jump rope under them; teens jump up and tag their umbrella-like edges. Dog-walkers get their leashes tied up around their steely poles but with colorful panache. Then it turns out the Rockettes have come up with a peppy, inspirational song about how these pushpins [branches] are "here, there, everywhere" while riding past atop a doubledecker tourist bus. At last, the jump-roping kids ask us "What's in your wallet?" as if we had somehow got onto that subject.
It is all quite incoherent as effective marketing, but the chilling message remains: we have invaded and you're going to like it. This hearkens back to an earlier and more interesting Capital One campaign that then morphed into a truly brazen and awful spectacle of cruelty and indifference.
A couple of years ago, a Capital One Ad Genius apparently came up with the idea that, since high-interest, no-reward credit cards could be construed as predatory, they could fairly be depicted as a Viking horde pillaging the suburban landscape--until the doughty Capital One credit card customer flashed his/her magic plastic, which seemed to rob the buffalo-robed Huns of their strength and made them drop their maces and halberds and crawl away simpering like stricken curs. The tag line was "What's in your wallet?" as if to say "watch out--your credit card may be eating you alive". Fair enough.
That campaign, at least, could pass the test for consistent logic. But then the Capital One Ad Genius took this tenuously coherent idea and turned it into something truly wretched. Now the Capital One Huns became everyday inhabitants of our world, and instead of marauding, simply misbehaved incoherently. They clanked weapons down at airport security, they smashed lobsters with sledgehammers at fancy restaurants, they were unusually cruel to women whose hair they were styling at the Hun Hair Salon. Then, quite inappropriately, one of them would turn his snaggletoothed visage to the viewer and croak "What's in your wallet?". The tag-line no longer made sense, since the Huns had turned goofy and apparently had been widely accepted (unlike the long-suffering Geico cavemen). The Ad Genius had lost the thread.
At last the thread became utterly entangled (I am sure the marketers were touting it as "convergence") around the Huns, the attacking pushpins and the jump-roping kids. As noted above, the jump-roping kids are now asking us what's in our wallet. This represents the altogether fatuous assumption that we, in reality, have adopted the Huns, the attacking pushpins and the inanely parading Rockettes as part of our own personal landscape, and would know perfectly well what sort of message was being delivered to us when the jump-roping kids asked us what was in our wallet.
The problem is that the Hun ploy was tenuous to begin with; that the pushpins were offensive; and the two paired became utterly contemptuous of reason and good sense.
I know little about the actual business of Capital One nor do I care to know it. I do know their Ad Genius should be fired for having polluted our televisions with a series of degrading, insulting, incoherent commercials that make me wonder about the collective soundness of executive minds at the client company.
What's in your commercial?
The offending campaign concerns their boasting about how many branches they have. Each branch is represented by a three-story-high red pushpin (like on a map!), except that the pushpin arrives plunging through the lower atmosphere much as would a missile, embedding itself violently in the sidewalk outside of each supposed Capital One branch. My problem is with the violent, transgressive, anti-New York feeling evoked by the sight of giant missiles attacking the city, and perhaps worse, the notion that people will see this (broken sidewalks and all), and instead of fleeing the invasion, go about their business, mildly curious, quite as if they had been hoping, mildly, to see one of these random, dangerous attacks for themselves (there is an element of terrorism as well as an element of unseemly voyeurism to it, in my opinion). In an especially baffling twist, there is even a giant pushpin that smashes into and pins a taxi to the ground, while an Islamic-looking driver gets out and seems dismayed that his taxi has been utterly destroyed. His reaction is as if someone had spilled Kool-Aid on the hood.
Lately the campaign has morphed into something truly monstrous. Now the giant destructive pushpins are simply part of the city landscape--giant, red alien presences blocking sidewalks--and cityfolk have adopted them as the kind of sorta-fun, only-in-NY semi-nuisances that get accepted as part of the diverse urban landscape (like counterfeit handbag hawkers?--rogue shish-kebab vendors?). Children jump rope under them; teens jump up and tag their umbrella-like edges. Dog-walkers get their leashes tied up around their steely poles but with colorful panache. Then it turns out the Rockettes have come up with a peppy, inspirational song about how these pushpins [branches] are "here, there, everywhere" while riding past atop a doubledecker tourist bus. At last, the jump-roping kids ask us "What's in your wallet?" as if we had somehow got onto that subject.
It is all quite incoherent as effective marketing, but the chilling message remains: we have invaded and you're going to like it. This hearkens back to an earlier and more interesting Capital One campaign that then morphed into a truly brazen and awful spectacle of cruelty and indifference.
A couple of years ago, a Capital One Ad Genius apparently came up with the idea that, since high-interest, no-reward credit cards could be construed as predatory, they could fairly be depicted as a Viking horde pillaging the suburban landscape--until the doughty Capital One credit card customer flashed his/her magic plastic, which seemed to rob the buffalo-robed Huns of their strength and made them drop their maces and halberds and crawl away simpering like stricken curs. The tag line was "What's in your wallet?" as if to say "watch out--your credit card may be eating you alive". Fair enough.
That campaign, at least, could pass the test for consistent logic. But then the Capital One Ad Genius took this tenuously coherent idea and turned it into something truly wretched. Now the Capital One Huns became everyday inhabitants of our world, and instead of marauding, simply misbehaved incoherently. They clanked weapons down at airport security, they smashed lobsters with sledgehammers at fancy restaurants, they were unusually cruel to women whose hair they were styling at the Hun Hair Salon. Then, quite inappropriately, one of them would turn his snaggletoothed visage to the viewer and croak "What's in your wallet?". The tag-line no longer made sense, since the Huns had turned goofy and apparently had been widely accepted (unlike the long-suffering Geico cavemen). The Ad Genius had lost the thread.
At last the thread became utterly entangled (I am sure the marketers were touting it as "convergence") around the Huns, the attacking pushpins and the jump-roping kids. As noted above, the jump-roping kids are now asking us what's in our wallet. This represents the altogether fatuous assumption that we, in reality, have adopted the Huns, the attacking pushpins and the inanely parading Rockettes as part of our own personal landscape, and would know perfectly well what sort of message was being delivered to us when the jump-roping kids asked us what was in our wallet.
The problem is that the Hun ploy was tenuous to begin with; that the pushpins were offensive; and the two paired became utterly contemptuous of reason and good sense.
I know little about the actual business of Capital One nor do I care to know it. I do know their Ad Genius should be fired for having polluted our televisions with a series of degrading, insulting, incoherent commercials that make me wonder about the collective soundness of executive minds at the client company.
What's in your commercial?
Saturday, November 28, 2009
The Glory that is the Company that Rents the Time Life Name and Logo
Bowser, the Sha-Na-Na guy, was actually a performer at Woodstock. His greaser-persona, an intentionally ironic throwback even forty years ago, made it seem an unlikely venue for him. But perhaps it is less unlikely that the now-superannuated Bowser is on TV hawking a multiple CD collection of the great, great 1950s songs through a mysterious company that also rents out the Time Life name and logo for the purposes of bestowing legitimacy on a decidedly shifty operation.
I pride myself on making certain to avoid scams and have done so all of my adult life. I will say now (whether you choose to believe me or not) that I always thought Dubai and its silly tall building and its pathetic palm-shaped island would be headed for the scrap-heap even before they'd be finished. When I was a teenager I knew a particular kid, known to me as a teller of Burj-Dubai-worthy tall-tales, who told all my friends he was suffering from a soon-to-be-fatal case of Hodgkins disease (or the like). All my friends believed him, went over his house, gave him presents, wept. I told them he was full of baloney. They called me inhumane and an intolerable cynic. Then the kid didn't die. He'd never been sick. However my nickname became "the cynic" and not in a bad way.
There have been lapses. Still in shock over that date which shall not be mentioned, I fell for a Republican's insistence that we must invade Babylon though I had long taught myself never to trust a single word spoken through Republican lips. And look what happened.
The second time was when I believed in Bowser. I had some prompting from a family member: "You love all that fifties stuff, you should get this". The hits did sound good. And Bowser made several promises to which I shall not hold him personally responsible.
Suffice it to say the on-line purchasing process was damnably deceptive, and that it somehow jumped to a "you have just purchased" page without my clicking "purchase", and that it added several way-overpriced, unwanted items to my tab, and that the order could not be canceled until after it shipped (!), and my only option would be to return everything after I'd received it based on the promise of a "full money back guarantee". Fortunately I had made the purchase using American Express and they are pretty good about defending against this kind of chicanery.
The moral of the story is that one should a)never listen to a Republican and b)never fall victim to what is an obvious scam even if it seems in every way appealing and as if it cannot possibly really be of any harm.
Finally, let it be known that the old brand of "Time Life" now survives not as the proud emblem of the world's most recognizable publishing empire but as a front for cheap shills trying play on the pipe of historical significance. Don't fall for it.
I pride myself on making certain to avoid scams and have done so all of my adult life. I will say now (whether you choose to believe me or not) that I always thought Dubai and its silly tall building and its pathetic palm-shaped island would be headed for the scrap-heap even before they'd be finished. When I was a teenager I knew a particular kid, known to me as a teller of Burj-Dubai-worthy tall-tales, who told all my friends he was suffering from a soon-to-be-fatal case of Hodgkins disease (or the like). All my friends believed him, went over his house, gave him presents, wept. I told them he was full of baloney. They called me inhumane and an intolerable cynic. Then the kid didn't die. He'd never been sick. However my nickname became "the cynic" and not in a bad way.
There have been lapses. Still in shock over that date which shall not be mentioned, I fell for a Republican's insistence that we must invade Babylon though I had long taught myself never to trust a single word spoken through Republican lips. And look what happened.
The second time was when I believed in Bowser. I had some prompting from a family member: "You love all that fifties stuff, you should get this". The hits did sound good. And Bowser made several promises to which I shall not hold him personally responsible.
Suffice it to say the on-line purchasing process was damnably deceptive, and that it somehow jumped to a "you have just purchased" page without my clicking "purchase", and that it added several way-overpriced, unwanted items to my tab, and that the order could not be canceled until after it shipped (!), and my only option would be to return everything after I'd received it based on the promise of a "full money back guarantee". Fortunately I had made the purchase using American Express and they are pretty good about defending against this kind of chicanery.
The moral of the story is that one should a)never listen to a Republican and b)never fall victim to what is an obvious scam even if it seems in every way appealing and as if it cannot possibly really be of any harm.
Finally, let it be known that the old brand of "Time Life" now survives not as the proud emblem of the world's most recognizable publishing empire but as a front for cheap shills trying play on the pipe of historical significance. Don't fall for it.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Bring Back Elliot Spitzer
The timing was immaculate. His unsavory deeds were not.
And in spite of the former New York Governor's erstwhile tramping around the Mayflower in just his socks ordering call girls to do it as dirty as can be, I believe we want him back--as Governor of New York State--on his political and prosecutorial merits.
He's already appearing on legitimate talk shows and they are not talking with him about condoms. For instance, on last night's TRMS (The Rachel Maddow Show), hosted brightly but haltingly by the irrepressible Howard Dean, Spitzer was a guest and held forth on "The Trouble with Wall Street". In a cogent, cutting manner (as is typical for him), he rather eviscerated the current pay structure and mindset of Wall Street. Specifically, he said "compensation has to come down" and "these executives are fiduciaries that work for the investors; they are supposed to safeguard the shareholders' money--instead they simply took the shareholders' money for themselves while making catastrophic decisions".
Here we have an ex-Governor of the Wall Street State honing in on the Wall Street pirates like a torpedo plane dropping a steel fish into the water a quarter mile away and in the direction of the Bismarck. He clearly has it in for these guys and he should--as any American patriot ought to.
But for him it may be even more than that. I mentioned the timing above. In hindsight it now seems very possible if not likely that the sudden revelation of his sordid trysting (that came only months before the historic collapse of the Wall Street bubble which has resulted in the worst economic era in any of our lifetimes unless we are at least octogenarians), may have been engineered by his foes down on the Street. They knew he was a pit bull, they knew he didn't care for their chicanery, they probably knew he was going to be investigating, they probably suspected or knew he was going to come down on them like a bunker-busting bomb. And so they struck first. They pretty much cut his political legs off with some seriously scandalous news, and so he toppled and fell. Now somewhat rehabilitated, Spitzer is back on his feet and may be looking for a little bit of payback.
His resignation was a win for Wall Street and the right-wing in so many ways, but I will mention just two. Spitzer, a sitting governor deeply opposed to the treachery entrenched in the financial markets of his own state, was forced to resign in disgrace. His replacement, an unsteady buffoon, is about as much a threat to Wall Street as a Vermont Teddy Bear is to a run of salmon.
But now the world has changed again. The wizards of Wall Street look more like Sauron than Gandalf. Spitzer looks more like a steely-eyed (if perhaps kinky) Aragorn than the way he looked when he resigned (which was like Gollum). Americans, still gasping for air in the oily choke-hold of a class of cynical banker-thieves, cannot at this moment be overly concerned with the bedroom antics of anyone equipped to break that choke-hold. This is especially so if the potential rescuer is of the political caliber of an Elliot Spitzer. We need a defender who knows the ropes and who knows what it feels like to trade grapeshot with the enemy.
We need Elliot Spitzer again. I nominate him for another term as Governor of the State of New York.
And in spite of the former New York Governor's erstwhile tramping around the Mayflower in just his socks ordering call girls to do it as dirty as can be, I believe we want him back--as Governor of New York State--on his political and prosecutorial merits.
He's already appearing on legitimate talk shows and they are not talking with him about condoms. For instance, on last night's TRMS (The Rachel Maddow Show), hosted brightly but haltingly by the irrepressible Howard Dean, Spitzer was a guest and held forth on "The Trouble with Wall Street". In a cogent, cutting manner (as is typical for him), he rather eviscerated the current pay structure and mindset of Wall Street. Specifically, he said "compensation has to come down" and "these executives are fiduciaries that work for the investors; they are supposed to safeguard the shareholders' money--instead they simply took the shareholders' money for themselves while making catastrophic decisions".
Here we have an ex-Governor of the Wall Street State honing in on the Wall Street pirates like a torpedo plane dropping a steel fish into the water a quarter mile away and in the direction of the Bismarck. He clearly has it in for these guys and he should--as any American patriot ought to.
But for him it may be even more than that. I mentioned the timing above. In hindsight it now seems very possible if not likely that the sudden revelation of his sordid trysting (that came only months before the historic collapse of the Wall Street bubble which has resulted in the worst economic era in any of our lifetimes unless we are at least octogenarians), may have been engineered by his foes down on the Street. They knew he was a pit bull, they knew he didn't care for their chicanery, they probably knew he was going to be investigating, they probably suspected or knew he was going to come down on them like a bunker-busting bomb. And so they struck first. They pretty much cut his political legs off with some seriously scandalous news, and so he toppled and fell. Now somewhat rehabilitated, Spitzer is back on his feet and may be looking for a little bit of payback.
His resignation was a win for Wall Street and the right-wing in so many ways, but I will mention just two. Spitzer, a sitting governor deeply opposed to the treachery entrenched in the financial markets of his own state, was forced to resign in disgrace. His replacement, an unsteady buffoon, is about as much a threat to Wall Street as a Vermont Teddy Bear is to a run of salmon.
But now the world has changed again. The wizards of Wall Street look more like Sauron than Gandalf. Spitzer looks more like a steely-eyed (if perhaps kinky) Aragorn than the way he looked when he resigned (which was like Gollum). Americans, still gasping for air in the oily choke-hold of a class of cynical banker-thieves, cannot at this moment be overly concerned with the bedroom antics of anyone equipped to break that choke-hold. This is especially so if the potential rescuer is of the political caliber of an Elliot Spitzer. We need a defender who knows the ropes and who knows what it feels like to trade grapeshot with the enemy.
We need Elliot Spitzer again. I nominate him for another term as Governor of the State of New York.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Of Driving and the Original Wilderness
I am a train lover. I am an airline-intense-disliker (especially of the constitution-violating security measures they employ). I am an avid city-walker and an enthusiastic, if occasional country-hiker.
Perhaps it is a surprise to hear that a person (me) living in a place where one needs no car loves--truly loves--driving. Perhaps it is because that person doesn't ever really need to drive? And never has commuted by car in his life (except for a grim and thankfully brief period in his teens, intra-suburb,"carpooling" in the back seat of an AMC Gremlin, an experience so dispiriting it may have been life-changing)?
But I do love driving. And I can think of no more act quite as assuredly enthralling as pressing down on the gas, rounding a curve, coming upon a new vista, passing some relative slowpoke perhaps, and feeling quite in control and on top of the world. I like to think of myself as a "good driver". I don't do stunts. I don't speed. I use my mirrors. I am respectful of other cars, inanimate objects, the odd small animal and especially pedestrians. I am probably a regular goody-two-shoes of a driver. But none of that innate caution detracts from the feeling of power and ascendancy that comes from moving at speed through a gorgeous landscape--protected from the elements, The Basement Tapes playing off the iPod--I become misty at the thought.
Then there is the choice of venue. Perhaps a tour through the clamor and waste of, say, southern Nassau County, or to spin oneself endlessly in circles around the magnificent, vast parking lots of the Paramus Mall would not afford the same exaltation. But I do a fair amount of my driving in the storied, gorgeously well-endowed, quasi-rural and sophisticated Hudson Valley--a geography that has certainly got its due historically but remains underreported as one of the world's Great Locations.
The Hudson Valley is America's first "wilderness"--wilderness being a concept that requires a non-wilderness (and in this case that would be the million-footed beast clutching that last Palisade of the valley before its great river washes out past the skyscrapers and into the bay and the bight and ultimately the sea). It was sold to the masses cramped in city-quarters a such, and so many carriages and trains and parkways endeavored to take them there over the course of, say, the time just before the Civil War to the time just after Woodstock, that it became after a time overlooked and came to be seen as "your father's paradise" and therefore kind of dowdy and maybe even creepy. Certainly the dozens of abandoned, wretched-looking tourist shacks that cluster near some of the interior roadways do nothing to dispel the notion it may have been, for a time, pretty much a lowlife destination and kind of creepy.
I'm here to tell you today that it's not anybody's paradise, but that it's got as much charm and intrinsic beauty (and as many great restaurants) as any richly endowed valley in any part of the world. The other day I drove up River Road on the eastern side of the Hudson north of Rhinebeck (a very winning little crossroads town in and of itself) and was astonished at the autumn finery in the trees, the ancient, native architecture of the houses nestled in crooks of the valley, the way the road wound about through woods and over streams, and at last how it ended up in the entirely underrated river town of Hudson, New York, a very small city whose main street happens to be a study in American architecture from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century and is lined with stores and restaurants of a quality and sophistication more to be expected in urban centers like Tribeca and Soho.
There is a long story waiting to be written about how the Hudson Valley now beckons the driver to its winding, shady roads and tempts the driver with succulent feasts at charming restaurants owned by chefs that might as well have made their mark in Manhattan. But that would be a much longer story than this format will tolerate.
Let me just say it again: a) I love driving and b) I especially love driving in the Hudson Valley.
Perhaps it is a surprise to hear that a person (me) living in a place where one needs no car loves--truly loves--driving. Perhaps it is because that person doesn't ever really need to drive? And never has commuted by car in his life (except for a grim and thankfully brief period in his teens, intra-suburb,"carpooling" in the back seat of an AMC Gremlin, an experience so dispiriting it may have been life-changing)?
But I do love driving. And I can think of no more act quite as assuredly enthralling as pressing down on the gas, rounding a curve, coming upon a new vista, passing some relative slowpoke perhaps, and feeling quite in control and on top of the world. I like to think of myself as a "good driver". I don't do stunts. I don't speed. I use my mirrors. I am respectful of other cars, inanimate objects, the odd small animal and especially pedestrians. I am probably a regular goody-two-shoes of a driver. But none of that innate caution detracts from the feeling of power and ascendancy that comes from moving at speed through a gorgeous landscape--protected from the elements, The Basement Tapes playing off the iPod--I become misty at the thought.
Then there is the choice of venue. Perhaps a tour through the clamor and waste of, say, southern Nassau County, or to spin oneself endlessly in circles around the magnificent, vast parking lots of the Paramus Mall would not afford the same exaltation. But I do a fair amount of my driving in the storied, gorgeously well-endowed, quasi-rural and sophisticated Hudson Valley--a geography that has certainly got its due historically but remains underreported as one of the world's Great Locations.
The Hudson Valley is America's first "wilderness"--wilderness being a concept that requires a non-wilderness (and in this case that would be the million-footed beast clutching that last Palisade of the valley before its great river washes out past the skyscrapers and into the bay and the bight and ultimately the sea). It was sold to the masses cramped in city-quarters a such, and so many carriages and trains and parkways endeavored to take them there over the course of, say, the time just before the Civil War to the time just after Woodstock, that it became after a time overlooked and came to be seen as "your father's paradise" and therefore kind of dowdy and maybe even creepy. Certainly the dozens of abandoned, wretched-looking tourist shacks that cluster near some of the interior roadways do nothing to dispel the notion it may have been, for a time, pretty much a lowlife destination and kind of creepy.
I'm here to tell you today that it's not anybody's paradise, but that it's got as much charm and intrinsic beauty (and as many great restaurants) as any richly endowed valley in any part of the world. The other day I drove up River Road on the eastern side of the Hudson north of Rhinebeck (a very winning little crossroads town in and of itself) and was astonished at the autumn finery in the trees, the ancient, native architecture of the houses nestled in crooks of the valley, the way the road wound about through woods and over streams, and at last how it ended up in the entirely underrated river town of Hudson, New York, a very small city whose main street happens to be a study in American architecture from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century and is lined with stores and restaurants of a quality and sophistication more to be expected in urban centers like Tribeca and Soho.
There is a long story waiting to be written about how the Hudson Valley now beckons the driver to its winding, shady roads and tempts the driver with succulent feasts at charming restaurants owned by chefs that might as well have made their mark in Manhattan. But that would be a much longer story than this format will tolerate.
Let me just say it again: a) I love driving and b) I especially love driving in the Hudson Valley.
Friday, November 13, 2009
The Real Tragedy of 2012
No, I am not predicting a Palin Presidency in the last year of the Mayan calendar.
Nor am I predicting that the tetrahedral energy fields inside the earth must realign in a couple of years, yanking as it were the tablecloth from underneath every living thing and every building and every mountain on the surface. And I'm not suggesting, either, the way a show called "2012: Shocking Secrets" (Syfy Channel) did, that there just may be an ancient archive beneath a certain random patch of sand in Egypt that would contain an Atlantean-inspired labyrinth structured in a manner to help us understand how to survive cataclysms--if only we could just find any evidence of it!
What I am saying is that if there's ever a time when the cranks and simpletons turn out to be right, and that if it ever comes in the form of any sort of Armageddon that will prevent these paranoid, doom-obsessed oafs from ever having to go to those stupid jobs of theirs ever again, and if these oafs have succeeded in surviving the worldwide catastrophe by hunkering down inside an old missile silo (growing food and raising animals down there), then the tragedy for us all is that the genetic material passed on to the next round of human unfortunates will be of suspect quality indeed.
And perhaps this is why humanity has never progressed all that far in certain respects: because all the smart people are too busy studying the genome or writing great plays or building clever code bases for gaming devices while the very dumbest and most paranoid members of humanity are obsessed with locating bunkers where they might survive when the comet hits. And perhaps this has happened a few times over the course of the last few hundred thousand years (roughly as far back as when the first homos erectus apparently daubed paint on the walls of caves and made nightstands out of bear-skulls).
Perhaps the myths about prior golden ages are true--Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, Middle Earth, the American 1950s--and what happened was that each was struck down by catastrophe but that all the musicians and teachers were killed in their conservatories while just a few cranks and oafs and ancient-text-thumpers were dumb enough to have spent their lives building underground shelters and also far too dumb to have recognized they ought to have preserved a few books for the edification of the new races of man that would succeed them.
It certainly seems possible today that the half-literate yoyos stockpiling generators, fuel and generic canned goods may, if they are lucky, survive the imminent flipping of the magnetic poles, or the arrival of Planet X (that will tear away large portions of the Earth); but they will have forgotten to preserve Mozart or Lou Reed or Thomas Mann or McSweeney's and certainly not the means to create microchips, and so in a hundred thousand years when the great cities are rebuilt, those future humans will look back and wonder how those dopey men and women of eons past could have gotten along for so very many centuries without having developed any meaningful culture at all.
Isn't that what we wonder today? Do we not try to puzzle out how men and women lived for two hundred and ninety-thousand years before anyone bothered to write anything down, and how culture seemed to arrive already in full flower? Is it possible that, say, a hundred thousand years ago there were some yobs building an underground haven to protect themselves from tetrahedral realignment, and that they alone survived but were kind of like the vapid cranks doing the same thing today and therefore would have been too stupid to have gotten access to and protected the magic crystals that provided free energy to all ancient races?
That prospect is the looming tragedy of 2012. Unless by some cruel twist of fate we get stuck with Sarah Palin as President, in which case all bets will be off.
Nor am I predicting that the tetrahedral energy fields inside the earth must realign in a couple of years, yanking as it were the tablecloth from underneath every living thing and every building and every mountain on the surface. And I'm not suggesting, either, the way a show called "2012: Shocking Secrets" (Syfy Channel) did, that there just may be an ancient archive beneath a certain random patch of sand in Egypt that would contain an Atlantean-inspired labyrinth structured in a manner to help us understand how to survive cataclysms--if only we could just find any evidence of it!
What I am saying is that if there's ever a time when the cranks and simpletons turn out to be right, and that if it ever comes in the form of any sort of Armageddon that will prevent these paranoid, doom-obsessed oafs from ever having to go to those stupid jobs of theirs ever again, and if these oafs have succeeded in surviving the worldwide catastrophe by hunkering down inside an old missile silo (growing food and raising animals down there), then the tragedy for us all is that the genetic material passed on to the next round of human unfortunates will be of suspect quality indeed.
And perhaps this is why humanity has never progressed all that far in certain respects: because all the smart people are too busy studying the genome or writing great plays or building clever code bases for gaming devices while the very dumbest and most paranoid members of humanity are obsessed with locating bunkers where they might survive when the comet hits. And perhaps this has happened a few times over the course of the last few hundred thousand years (roughly as far back as when the first homos erectus apparently daubed paint on the walls of caves and made nightstands out of bear-skulls).
Perhaps the myths about prior golden ages are true--Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, Middle Earth, the American 1950s--and what happened was that each was struck down by catastrophe but that all the musicians and teachers were killed in their conservatories while just a few cranks and oafs and ancient-text-thumpers were dumb enough to have spent their lives building underground shelters and also far too dumb to have recognized they ought to have preserved a few books for the edification of the new races of man that would succeed them.
It certainly seems possible today that the half-literate yoyos stockpiling generators, fuel and generic canned goods may, if they are lucky, survive the imminent flipping of the magnetic poles, or the arrival of Planet X (that will tear away large portions of the Earth); but they will have forgotten to preserve Mozart or Lou Reed or Thomas Mann or McSweeney's and certainly not the means to create microchips, and so in a hundred thousand years when the great cities are rebuilt, those future humans will look back and wonder how those dopey men and women of eons past could have gotten along for so very many centuries without having developed any meaningful culture at all.
Isn't that what we wonder today? Do we not try to puzzle out how men and women lived for two hundred and ninety-thousand years before anyone bothered to write anything down, and how culture seemed to arrive already in full flower? Is it possible that, say, a hundred thousand years ago there were some yobs building an underground haven to protect themselves from tetrahedral realignment, and that they alone survived but were kind of like the vapid cranks doing the same thing today and therefore would have been too stupid to have gotten access to and protected the magic crystals that provided free energy to all ancient races?
That prospect is the looming tragedy of 2012. Unless by some cruel twist of fate we get stuck with Sarah Palin as President, in which case all bets will be off.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Oasis on Forty Seventh Street
I've posted before about how New York, and especially Manhattan, has been stripped nearly bare of its old, quirky shops--the ones that sold fascinating industrial junk on Canal St, for instance, have one and all been replaced by tiny storefronts all selling counterfeit perfume and watches--and how this has made the city, for large stretches, nothing but an open-air mall with the same chain stores and the same merchandise as in the Dubuque Town Centre (if there is one), but no doubt at much higher prices.
There are of course exceptions, though they seem precarious. There is a subterranean purveyor of model trains and plastic kits on Forty Fifth Street and it is indubitably quirky as is its goggled, high-waisted owner who dispenses N and Z-scale wisdom along with intricately detailed versions of 4-88-4s and pint-sized build-it-yourself Mysterions (incidentally, model-building seems a childhood pleasure now much lost to the ravages of video games--I defy you to try and find a model kit at WalMart--but I digress). There is also a stalwart sandwich shop on East Fortieth going by the rather infelicitous name of "Vaco e Pres" and it used to be run by Italians or Albanians and they made some of the tastiest heroes (not subs!) this side of heaven's gate; it is still there and they still make the sandwiches but it is owned by Vietnamese people now and one supposed one has no reason to lament that in and of itself (though I will hazard a guess they have no more idea what the name of the place means than do I).
However, the exception--the Oasis--of which I am posting today is on Forty Seventh Street and it has long been called The Mercantile Library--not to be confused with the much larger, much less elegant Mechanic's Society Library on Forty Fifth, or the Chemist's Club on Forty First which is now the hotel Dylan. The Mercantile Library recently changed its name to the Center for Fiction and I urge you not to become a member.
The reason I ask you not to join is because then you will help make the place more crowded and less an oasis. For right now it is, for those who can afford the rather reasonable yearly fee, a well-stocked three-floor library (with a great many older books not to be encountered at the NYPL branches) and a place where you can actually sit in a well-appointed room with books and plaster busts and leather chairs and rugs and hardwood floors and all the latest periodicals (on paper!), and read. You can stay as long as you like. They do not have wireless (though the writer's desks on a separate floor do and they cost a certain amount per month to rent). They do have a very good water fountain and they do have very nice bathrooms if I may say so. And like I said, you can sit in the well-appointed, clubby-feeling reading room as long as you like (reading books!); or you an sit at a table and read books or the papers and write or take notes; or you can, if you have a Blackberry, spend your time writing and answering emails though this would seem to defeat the purpose of going there.
For myself, I almost cannot believe the place exists. It is quiet, it is literary, it is not expensive for what it offers, and it is in the midst of a city so unkind to places like it that I fear (unless it is endowed with a fund of which I am unaware)it may one day close its doors and re-open as a Mongolian barbecue.
For now, I am enjoying the respite. I sometimes bring my own books to read there, just because it is such a relaxing, beautiful little place--clean, well-lighted, quiet. Sane, in a word--a quality much lacking in our culture of general cruelty and indifference. Did I mention the bathrooms were very clean?
There are of course exceptions, though they seem precarious. There is a subterranean purveyor of model trains and plastic kits on Forty Fifth Street and it is indubitably quirky as is its goggled, high-waisted owner who dispenses N and Z-scale wisdom along with intricately detailed versions of 4-88-4s and pint-sized build-it-yourself Mysterions (incidentally, model-building seems a childhood pleasure now much lost to the ravages of video games--I defy you to try and find a model kit at WalMart--but I digress). There is also a stalwart sandwich shop on East Fortieth going by the rather infelicitous name of "Vaco e Pres" and it used to be run by Italians or Albanians and they made some of the tastiest heroes (not subs!) this side of heaven's gate; it is still there and they still make the sandwiches but it is owned by Vietnamese people now and one supposed one has no reason to lament that in and of itself (though I will hazard a guess they have no more idea what the name of the place means than do I).
However, the exception--the Oasis--of which I am posting today is on Forty Seventh Street and it has long been called The Mercantile Library--not to be confused with the much larger, much less elegant Mechanic's Society Library on Forty Fifth, or the Chemist's Club on Forty First which is now the hotel Dylan. The Mercantile Library recently changed its name to the Center for Fiction and I urge you not to become a member.
The reason I ask you not to join is because then you will help make the place more crowded and less an oasis. For right now it is, for those who can afford the rather reasonable yearly fee, a well-stocked three-floor library (with a great many older books not to be encountered at the NYPL branches) and a place where you can actually sit in a well-appointed room with books and plaster busts and leather chairs and rugs and hardwood floors and all the latest periodicals (on paper!), and read. You can stay as long as you like. They do not have wireless (though the writer's desks on a separate floor do and they cost a certain amount per month to rent). They do have a very good water fountain and they do have very nice bathrooms if I may say so. And like I said, you can sit in the well-appointed, clubby-feeling reading room as long as you like (reading books!); or you an sit at a table and read books or the papers and write or take notes; or you can, if you have a Blackberry, spend your time writing and answering emails though this would seem to defeat the purpose of going there.
For myself, I almost cannot believe the place exists. It is quiet, it is literary, it is not expensive for what it offers, and it is in the midst of a city so unkind to places like it that I fear (unless it is endowed with a fund of which I am unaware)it may one day close its doors and re-open as a Mongolian barbecue.
For now, I am enjoying the respite. I sometimes bring my own books to read there, just because it is such a relaxing, beautiful little place--clean, well-lighted, quiet. Sane, in a word--a quality much lacking in our culture of general cruelty and indifference. Did I mention the bathrooms were very clean?
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
I was a Deluded Liberal
The tiny elections held last night loom large in the reconstruction of the Republican party even as the tiniest election of them all, in upstate New York, threaten to keep it confused and hobbled by divisive internal attacks from Valkyries like Sarah Palin. She and Dick Armey and the Teabagger Militia rolled in behind an ultra-conservative against a moderate Republican and thereby handed the long-red district to the blues.
But for Democrats, last night was, I believe, a watershed of a different type. For me, anyway, it proved that Obama has waited too long to put his positive stamp on the country; has deferred too much to others; has simply not been the bold leader many had hoped he'd be. And now I think he has let the GOP, which had been flat on its back in the first row of seats like a wrestler hove out of the ring, climb back between the ropes bloodied but eager (and strong enough) for a fight.
Let us review for a moment the health care issue. Perhaps it wasn't obvious until right now that the thing ought to have been wrapped up and delivered before the election. The message moderates will take from the pair of big GOP gubernatorial victories is that Obama may not be magical after all; and that they need not support him on health reform. I could be wrong, but I think Obama has let the moment pass. Thanks to his pusillanimous fellow Dems in the Senate (especially the no-account Harry Reid) and thanks even more to the ever-perfidious Lieberman (who seems perversely to enjoy ruining any laudable cause he can influence), I think health care is going to be lost like a ship foundering in heavy seas, and that reform will be found only in Davey Jones' locker.
Let us now review New Jersey if we must. What gave the Democrats the idea they could win with a guy from Goldman Sachs who talks like an undertaker and doesn't know how to tie on a seat belt at high speed? Corzine stank of all that stinks in this land--the cynical manipulation of events with mountains of ill-gotten cash--and the voters went for the Other Guy, who happens to be a member of the Party of Limbaugh. Nice going, Dems.
Finally let us review Afghanistan. The right thing is to get us the hell out of that historical destroyer of empires. How many times does a person have to see "The Man Who Would Be King" before he realizes Afghanistan is a lose-lose proposition? And yet we waste blood and treasure there as if bin Laden were somehow just down the next street awaiting capture. I know Obama never said he wanted out of Central Asia. But so what? Afghanistan only adds to the sense that the extremely historic election in 2008 has resulted in nothing of great note on the ground. And lets just not talk about Iraq for now.
Sure, the stimulus has worked somewhat. Sure, there's lip service and some progress on some fronts (gay rights, energy independence); but any garden variety Democrat could have done as much.
Maybe Obama needed a wake up call. It's just that I'm not sure I know who he is right now, and what he'll do once he wakes up.
But for Democrats, last night was, I believe, a watershed of a different type. For me, anyway, it proved that Obama has waited too long to put his positive stamp on the country; has deferred too much to others; has simply not been the bold leader many had hoped he'd be. And now I think he has let the GOP, which had been flat on its back in the first row of seats like a wrestler hove out of the ring, climb back between the ropes bloodied but eager (and strong enough) for a fight.
Let us review for a moment the health care issue. Perhaps it wasn't obvious until right now that the thing ought to have been wrapped up and delivered before the election. The message moderates will take from the pair of big GOP gubernatorial victories is that Obama may not be magical after all; and that they need not support him on health reform. I could be wrong, but I think Obama has let the moment pass. Thanks to his pusillanimous fellow Dems in the Senate (especially the no-account Harry Reid) and thanks even more to the ever-perfidious Lieberman (who seems perversely to enjoy ruining any laudable cause he can influence), I think health care is going to be lost like a ship foundering in heavy seas, and that reform will be found only in Davey Jones' locker.
Let us now review New Jersey if we must. What gave the Democrats the idea they could win with a guy from Goldman Sachs who talks like an undertaker and doesn't know how to tie on a seat belt at high speed? Corzine stank of all that stinks in this land--the cynical manipulation of events with mountains of ill-gotten cash--and the voters went for the Other Guy, who happens to be a member of the Party of Limbaugh. Nice going, Dems.
Finally let us review Afghanistan. The right thing is to get us the hell out of that historical destroyer of empires. How many times does a person have to see "The Man Who Would Be King" before he realizes Afghanistan is a lose-lose proposition? And yet we waste blood and treasure there as if bin Laden were somehow just down the next street awaiting capture. I know Obama never said he wanted out of Central Asia. But so what? Afghanistan only adds to the sense that the extremely historic election in 2008 has resulted in nothing of great note on the ground. And lets just not talk about Iraq for now.
Sure, the stimulus has worked somewhat. Sure, there's lip service and some progress on some fronts (gay rights, energy independence); but any garden variety Democrat could have done as much.
Maybe Obama needed a wake up call. It's just that I'm not sure I know who he is right now, and what he'll do once he wakes up.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
A Terrifying Realization
Yankee fans are people too.
That was what I finally understood in the late innings of the game where the Yanks took out the Halos at the new Stadium in the Bronx. Watching the mass of excited faces, some praying, some hiding their faces (the team from Orange County was a hit away from tying it up), some on the verge of tears and some hooting like soccer hooligans, I realized much to my horror and surprise that Yankee fans are just a bunch of New York schlubs and no different than anyone else in this enormous small town.
Traditionally I am a Met fan. Which means I have watched the team crumble four years running; and that includes watching the most recent season become classifiable into that worst of all classes for a sporting event: boring. They have a new stadium--I liked Shea (Shake Shack? I came to watch a ballgame). They decked it out with stuff about some Dodger player--stupid. They have a formerly dynamic shortstop who can't run anymore. They have a young "superstar" who forgot how to hit homers this season and who for several seasons has not gotten many clutch hits of any kind though he has "good numbers". How dull.
You might say I have stopped really caring about the baseball team I've long rooted for. And during this window of sanity I have seen that the notion of "rooting", especially in a two-team city, is a painful, unnecessary distraction (perhaps I would feel different if my team had won 26 World Series); and that it falsely creates a disputatious relationship with one's fellow townsfolk.
I am a lover of the game of baseball--nothing will take away from the beauty of a well-hit line drive nor from the symmetry of men circling the bases trying to beat the throw home--but I think my rooting days are drawing to an end. I remember suffering greatly as the Mets failed in three successive seasons (not including this year when I tuned out very early). I have promised myself I will never allow myself to suffer that way again over anything as trifling as a ballteam.
And one of the happy outcomes of this is I have seen the humanity in the formerly hated Yankee fan. Arrogant and foolish and full of false pride (and an even more false sense of superiority and accomplishment), they are not so different than the run of humanity. Really, they are just typically bumbling New Yorkers trying to feel good about themselves for one night.
I will be watching the World Series. I have in the past of course also hated the Phillies. I don't now. May the best team win.
That was what I finally understood in the late innings of the game where the Yanks took out the Halos at the new Stadium in the Bronx. Watching the mass of excited faces, some praying, some hiding their faces (the team from Orange County was a hit away from tying it up), some on the verge of tears and some hooting like soccer hooligans, I realized much to my horror and surprise that Yankee fans are just a bunch of New York schlubs and no different than anyone else in this enormous small town.
Traditionally I am a Met fan. Which means I have watched the team crumble four years running; and that includes watching the most recent season become classifiable into that worst of all classes for a sporting event: boring. They have a new stadium--I liked Shea (Shake Shack? I came to watch a ballgame). They decked it out with stuff about some Dodger player--stupid. They have a formerly dynamic shortstop who can't run anymore. They have a young "superstar" who forgot how to hit homers this season and who for several seasons has not gotten many clutch hits of any kind though he has "good numbers". How dull.
You might say I have stopped really caring about the baseball team I've long rooted for. And during this window of sanity I have seen that the notion of "rooting", especially in a two-team city, is a painful, unnecessary distraction (perhaps I would feel different if my team had won 26 World Series); and that it falsely creates a disputatious relationship with one's fellow townsfolk.
I am a lover of the game of baseball--nothing will take away from the beauty of a well-hit line drive nor from the symmetry of men circling the bases trying to beat the throw home--but I think my rooting days are drawing to an end. I remember suffering greatly as the Mets failed in three successive seasons (not including this year when I tuned out very early). I have promised myself I will never allow myself to suffer that way again over anything as trifling as a ballteam.
And one of the happy outcomes of this is I have seen the humanity in the formerly hated Yankee fan. Arrogant and foolish and full of false pride (and an even more false sense of superiority and accomplishment), they are not so different than the run of humanity. Really, they are just typically bumbling New Yorkers trying to feel good about themselves for one night.
I will be watching the World Series. I have in the past of course also hated the Phillies. I don't now. May the best team win.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Awake Ye to the Fake Zebra in Palestine
According to numerous accounts, the Zebra at the zoo in Gaza is a fake. It's actually a donkey spray-painted to look like that striped denizen of the African savannah.
Apparently the specimen is at least healthier than the poor one-eyed lion or some of the other animals who are left dead in their cages to rot.
No doubt the excuse for this paltry zoo is that the Israelis have blockaded Gaza for so long that the Gazans cannot find a way to bring in a zebra even if they could get one.
And while it is certainly true that Israeli expansionism has been the cause of much human discord (milder in form but not unlike that of the Americans vs. the Native Americans); and while it is also true that the Israeli national character, such as it may be, has been sharpened and made angry and even irrational by the constant expressed ambition of its neighbors to kill every Jew in the land; and while I am no particular "fan" of Israel (I have never been there and so have no meaningful opinion of the place physically); for while all these are true, it cannot be said that the fake zebra, put into context with other wrong-headeded deeds committed by those under the spell of Hamas and its murderous minions, does not represent a particular pinnacle of both pathos and stupidity on the part of its perpetrators.
Yet American progressives seem to have a queer penchant for taking up the cause of the Palestinians almost without qualification and certainly without sufficient embarrassment.
Awake, progressives, to the unfortunate character-traits one must associate with those who cannot seem to make a state when all the world would help them make one if only they would stop behaving in a manner so dimwitted it confounds all good sense. For these people, oppressed as they may be, also may be architects of their own wretched fate. They may fear Hamas and perhaps cannot shake them. But we would not accept this excuse from another people. We would say people get the leadership they deserve.
I have only a firm hope that the average Palestinian can one day wake up in a world where he neither terrorizes nor is terrorized, but I do know this: he cannot hope to succeed with fake zebras.
Also, he cannot hope to succeed with cartoon characters whose only hope is to kill every Jew. He cannot hope to succeed with mothers who declare their sons and daughters heroic upon strapping bombs to themselves and killing innocents who may or may not be Jewish so long as they are riding a bus in Tel Aviv at the wrong moment. He cannot hope to succeed with fevered declarations of hate for their neighbors, not all of whom hate them nor wish to see them destroyed. He cannot hope to succeed with tunnels where the import of arms rather than bread is the object, and where, when he can, fires a rocket randomly (and often in futility) at population-centers with no goal but to tear humans limb from limb. These acts together are the raiment of a people long in defeat and with little prospect for success.
American progressives can help the cause of peace in Palestine by making clear (to the Gazans, chiefly) there are certain basic standards that cannot really be compromised. Without giving quarter to Israeli religious fanatics who seek to aggrandize their faith and increase their number at the cost of another's, it must be made clear that while we may smile ruefully about the fake zebra, the rest of it--the Jew-hating cartoon-mouse; the gun-toting government of thugs; the rockets; the inexplicable inability to get real support from so-called "fellow Arabs"; the inability of Gazan "leaders" to negotiate in good faith even as its people practically starve; these deficiencies really put their cause, until such time as the deficiencies are improved significantly, beneath meaningful consideration.
Perhaps getting a real zebra at the zoo would be a humble start at rehabilitation--I am sure there is a zebra somewhere in the world that might be put to good use in the greater service of peace in Palestine.
In the meantime, I am told children seem to enjoy the painted donkey. And I will admit, thinking of children at a zoo and a fake zebra, that the world is a complicated, baffling place.
Apparently the specimen is at least healthier than the poor one-eyed lion or some of the other animals who are left dead in their cages to rot.
No doubt the excuse for this paltry zoo is that the Israelis have blockaded Gaza for so long that the Gazans cannot find a way to bring in a zebra even if they could get one.
And while it is certainly true that Israeli expansionism has been the cause of much human discord (milder in form but not unlike that of the Americans vs. the Native Americans); and while it is also true that the Israeli national character, such as it may be, has been sharpened and made angry and even irrational by the constant expressed ambition of its neighbors to kill every Jew in the land; and while I am no particular "fan" of Israel (I have never been there and so have no meaningful opinion of the place physically); for while all these are true, it cannot be said that the fake zebra, put into context with other wrong-headeded deeds committed by those under the spell of Hamas and its murderous minions, does not represent a particular pinnacle of both pathos and stupidity on the part of its perpetrators.
Yet American progressives seem to have a queer penchant for taking up the cause of the Palestinians almost without qualification and certainly without sufficient embarrassment.
Awake, progressives, to the unfortunate character-traits one must associate with those who cannot seem to make a state when all the world would help them make one if only they would stop behaving in a manner so dimwitted it confounds all good sense. For these people, oppressed as they may be, also may be architects of their own wretched fate. They may fear Hamas and perhaps cannot shake them. But we would not accept this excuse from another people. We would say people get the leadership they deserve.
I have only a firm hope that the average Palestinian can one day wake up in a world where he neither terrorizes nor is terrorized, but I do know this: he cannot hope to succeed with fake zebras.
Also, he cannot hope to succeed with cartoon characters whose only hope is to kill every Jew. He cannot hope to succeed with mothers who declare their sons and daughters heroic upon strapping bombs to themselves and killing innocents who may or may not be Jewish so long as they are riding a bus in Tel Aviv at the wrong moment. He cannot hope to succeed with fevered declarations of hate for their neighbors, not all of whom hate them nor wish to see them destroyed. He cannot hope to succeed with tunnels where the import of arms rather than bread is the object, and where, when he can, fires a rocket randomly (and often in futility) at population-centers with no goal but to tear humans limb from limb. These acts together are the raiment of a people long in defeat and with little prospect for success.
American progressives can help the cause of peace in Palestine by making clear (to the Gazans, chiefly) there are certain basic standards that cannot really be compromised. Without giving quarter to Israeli religious fanatics who seek to aggrandize their faith and increase their number at the cost of another's, it must be made clear that while we may smile ruefully about the fake zebra, the rest of it--the Jew-hating cartoon-mouse; the gun-toting government of thugs; the rockets; the inexplicable inability to get real support from so-called "fellow Arabs"; the inability of Gazan "leaders" to negotiate in good faith even as its people practically starve; these deficiencies really put their cause, until such time as the deficiencies are improved significantly, beneath meaningful consideration.
Perhaps getting a real zebra at the zoo would be a humble start at rehabilitation--I am sure there is a zebra somewhere in the world that might be put to good use in the greater service of peace in Palestine.
In the meantime, I am told children seem to enjoy the painted donkey. And I will admit, thinking of children at a zoo and a fake zebra, that the world is a complicated, baffling place.
Friday, October 16, 2009
The Thrill of Vinyl
Records--you remember them if you're of a certain age.
And if you're younger than that, you may have noticed that sales of vinyl recordings are up rather significantly, perhaps because you have started buying them lately--perhaps in rebellion against the churlish nature of the recording industry and its "digital rights management" drones.
I'm in both camps. I have a lot of old vinyl lying around. I think the last LP I bought brand new was by a band called "Crowded House" back in the eighties and it is better not spoken of. But there are literally about a ton of classics in the collection as well.
The other day I bought a substantially produced re-issue of a vinyl recording by The Smiths. I placed it on a turntable and marveled. The platter spun, the mechanical arm gently floated over to the beginning of the first track--a slight hiss--and then: wonderful sound! So much richer, even on a pieced-together mess of a stereo system, than from a CD or an MP3 or 4 or whatever latest, least-lossy format our chipmakers have invented.
I am finding old LPs in great condition at cheap prices all over. And sure, I bought a turntable that can turn them into iPod-ready digital candy. But that's not the news. The news is that, due to a number of factors like: "I bought it, I own it and I can lend it and record it a thousand times and do whatever the hell I want with it including sell it to a used record store"; and "Holy crap, this sounds fantastic"; and perhaps most pleasantly: "there's something wonderful about watching an actual machine--with little wavy lines engraved in plastic and a tiny needle picking up vibrations--function before your very eyes like some strange jurassic denizen sprung suddenly to life in the full, colorful vitality of its youth", I am unlikely ever to spend much more than a pittance on either CDs or iTunes.
Or maybe I am thinking of my own youth. I don't know.
There is also substantial sensory pleasure in handling vinyl albums, in dusting them and blowing on them, in looking at album cover art and liner notes and inner sleeves and often enough, gratuitous "stuff" (posters, postcards, lyric sheets) that used to be tossed in with no particular fanfare.
Armed with my MP3 turntable, I never need worry about some stupid message from iTunes about where the song I bought "belongs" or ever worry that somehow it might be "withdrawn" the way Amazon recently "withdrew" some digital files from some folks' Kindles. Oh, and by the way, I own lots of actual books, too. I carry them around and read them. Shocking!
And if you're younger than that, you may have noticed that sales of vinyl recordings are up rather significantly, perhaps because you have started buying them lately--perhaps in rebellion against the churlish nature of the recording industry and its "digital rights management" drones.
I'm in both camps. I have a lot of old vinyl lying around. I think the last LP I bought brand new was by a band called "Crowded House" back in the eighties and it is better not spoken of. But there are literally about a ton of classics in the collection as well.
The other day I bought a substantially produced re-issue of a vinyl recording by The Smiths. I placed it on a turntable and marveled. The platter spun, the mechanical arm gently floated over to the beginning of the first track--a slight hiss--and then: wonderful sound! So much richer, even on a pieced-together mess of a stereo system, than from a CD or an MP3 or 4 or whatever latest, least-lossy format our chipmakers have invented.
I am finding old LPs in great condition at cheap prices all over. And sure, I bought a turntable that can turn them into iPod-ready digital candy. But that's not the news. The news is that, due to a number of factors like: "I bought it, I own it and I can lend it and record it a thousand times and do whatever the hell I want with it including sell it to a used record store"; and "Holy crap, this sounds fantastic"; and perhaps most pleasantly: "there's something wonderful about watching an actual machine--with little wavy lines engraved in plastic and a tiny needle picking up vibrations--function before your very eyes like some strange jurassic denizen sprung suddenly to life in the full, colorful vitality of its youth", I am unlikely ever to spend much more than a pittance on either CDs or iTunes.
Or maybe I am thinking of my own youth. I don't know.
There is also substantial sensory pleasure in handling vinyl albums, in dusting them and blowing on them, in looking at album cover art and liner notes and inner sleeves and often enough, gratuitous "stuff" (posters, postcards, lyric sheets) that used to be tossed in with no particular fanfare.
Armed with my MP3 turntable, I never need worry about some stupid message from iTunes about where the song I bought "belongs" or ever worry that somehow it might be "withdrawn" the way Amazon recently "withdrew" some digital files from some folks' Kindles. Oh, and by the way, I own lots of actual books, too. I carry them around and read them. Shocking!
Monday, October 12, 2009
I Love Science for its Mistakes (Moonbomb)
The other day--the same day, in fact, that our President controversially won the Nobel Peace Prize--NASA bombed the moon.
The poet in me--and many others, from what I can gather--was wounded. How could you want to bomb that mystical night-rider, puller of tides, mysterious mover of hearts? How to bomb that pale smiling disk for which wolves howl and that once shone a ghostly gleam on the polished sides of the Great Pyramids at Gizeh? It was one thing to gently land, take some rocks, romp in big funny suits, and depart in a flash. Quite another to hit the soft body of the moon with a missile, expecting to "throw up a six-mile high plume" of debris, and then with a second projectile, take measurements. It seemed in a way ignominious and certainly disrespectful to--and I think we can all agree--a lady.
But the rationalist in me could barely squelch a cheer. It sure sounded exciting! And anyway, the moon, a celestial body like any other, is bombarded by projectiles hundreds of times a year. Look at those craters! They didn't get there because poets were worrying about the moon's complexion. Then there was the whole "looking for water" gambit, which also held promise. Does anyone really hate the idea of a sustainable moonbase? Are we supposed to be stuck here on this stinky old Earth forever, or what?
The best part of the whole thing, and my point in this post, was that it certainly appears that the moonbombing was a very public, much over-hyped flop. There was no visible plume. Who knows what happened? It made no sense. And that is what I love about science.
Unlike the more vulnerable constructions of the universe (for instance that of, say, the literal Christian religion), science (should I capitalize it?) can withstand repeated failures and still not fail as a system of inquiry. For as we all know, science is based on hypothesis, discovery, and inference. Science never claims to "know" anything--only to have observed what appears to be, and can be demonstrated again to be, cause and effect.
This ice-veined method has given us much in the way of sustenance and comfort. Rampant, it has also threatened our very existence. Clearly the scientific method holds awesome power and only the simplest or most obstinate would deny its benefits (or its potential for harm). But it is the ability to fail--this fearlessness of failure; in fact this self-invitation to failure such that one can learn from the failure--that is the heart and soul of the discipline.
While I am certain there were a few red faces around the table at NASA after the expected result(a big, visible plume of dust) failed to materialize (though they claim to have caused enough disturbance to make a study in any case), the event certainly did not, despite not having lived up to expectations, deter a single scientist from belief in the usefulness of the discipline or even the mission itself.
And unlike the baseless, harebrained claims made by adherents to other belief systems (the world will end in 2012, the world was going to end in 1999, the world will end when the righteous are pulled up to heaven in the Rapture), science can continue to make considered predictions, have them fail, dust itself off, and try again. It does not claim to have "known" anything. It just keeps trying, and trying, and trying. And eventually, by all evidence, it will somehow succeed.
And as opposed to the spurious certitudes of seers and priests, how can you not love that about science?
The poet in me--and many others, from what I can gather--was wounded. How could you want to bomb that mystical night-rider, puller of tides, mysterious mover of hearts? How to bomb that pale smiling disk for which wolves howl and that once shone a ghostly gleam on the polished sides of the Great Pyramids at Gizeh? It was one thing to gently land, take some rocks, romp in big funny suits, and depart in a flash. Quite another to hit the soft body of the moon with a missile, expecting to "throw up a six-mile high plume" of debris, and then with a second projectile, take measurements. It seemed in a way ignominious and certainly disrespectful to--and I think we can all agree--a lady.
But the rationalist in me could barely squelch a cheer. It sure sounded exciting! And anyway, the moon, a celestial body like any other, is bombarded by projectiles hundreds of times a year. Look at those craters! They didn't get there because poets were worrying about the moon's complexion. Then there was the whole "looking for water" gambit, which also held promise. Does anyone really hate the idea of a sustainable moonbase? Are we supposed to be stuck here on this stinky old Earth forever, or what?
The best part of the whole thing, and my point in this post, was that it certainly appears that the moonbombing was a very public, much over-hyped flop. There was no visible plume. Who knows what happened? It made no sense. And that is what I love about science.
Unlike the more vulnerable constructions of the universe (for instance that of, say, the literal Christian religion), science (should I capitalize it?) can withstand repeated failures and still not fail as a system of inquiry. For as we all know, science is based on hypothesis, discovery, and inference. Science never claims to "know" anything--only to have observed what appears to be, and can be demonstrated again to be, cause and effect.
This ice-veined method has given us much in the way of sustenance and comfort. Rampant, it has also threatened our very existence. Clearly the scientific method holds awesome power and only the simplest or most obstinate would deny its benefits (or its potential for harm). But it is the ability to fail--this fearlessness of failure; in fact this self-invitation to failure such that one can learn from the failure--that is the heart and soul of the discipline.
While I am certain there were a few red faces around the table at NASA after the expected result(a big, visible plume of dust) failed to materialize (though they claim to have caused enough disturbance to make a study in any case), the event certainly did not, despite not having lived up to expectations, deter a single scientist from belief in the usefulness of the discipline or even the mission itself.
And unlike the baseless, harebrained claims made by adherents to other belief systems (the world will end in 2012, the world was going to end in 1999, the world will end when the righteous are pulled up to heaven in the Rapture), science can continue to make considered predictions, have them fail, dust itself off, and try again. It does not claim to have "known" anything. It just keeps trying, and trying, and trying. And eventually, by all evidence, it will somehow succeed.
And as opposed to the spurious certitudes of seers and priests, how can you not love that about science?
Thursday, October 8, 2009
One More Invader Repulsed
Afghanistan--can you believe we fell for it?
I think it was Kipling who said something like "Woe betide the man who tries to hustle the East". And apologies to General Westmoreland if it wasn't him who indicated we might have to destroy a Vietnamese village in order to save it.
We should have left Afghanistan after it was clear Osama had left.
We should have devoted all of our military might (and, while it may have been oxymoronic, intelligence) to finding his cave in Waziristan or Pakistan or his warren of rooms in Peshawar, and then penetrating the complex with bunker-busting ordinance. We still should.
But it doesn't take 40,000 troops to do this--it might take a couple of thousand and just like any manhunt, it would eventually come to an end with the culprit Dillingered and lying dead with a somewhat surprised look on his face.
Having chased the cruel Taliban out but not having won the hearts and minds of the Afghans (who knew?), we have now joined the long list of invaders who have been repulsed or who are about to be repulsed, or at least to go home in a military form of tatterdemallion, without having achieved any objective.
To be fair to the President, he never said he was hoping to pull out of Afghanistan. But that was then. There's no good reason to stay there. And you knew he couldn't have said he wanted to pull out of there anyway during the campaign because then McCain would have clenched his teeth even tighter and maybe even would have convinced someone that Obama would make a poor Commander in Chief.
I don't want to make this a referendum on Obama--but it's time to quit fooling with Afghanistan. To heck with what General McChrystal says. Nobody elected him. He's a fighting man and he's telling the boss what it would take to win.
But we don't need to win there, and should get out before they kill more American soldiers for no good reason. We should just focus on Bin Laden--that's all.
Support the Troops in Afghanistan. Time to come home.
--Renaissance
I think it was Kipling who said something like "Woe betide the man who tries to hustle the East". And apologies to General Westmoreland if it wasn't him who indicated we might have to destroy a Vietnamese village in order to save it.
We should have left Afghanistan after it was clear Osama had left.
We should have devoted all of our military might (and, while it may have been oxymoronic, intelligence) to finding his cave in Waziristan or Pakistan or his warren of rooms in Peshawar, and then penetrating the complex with bunker-busting ordinance. We still should.
But it doesn't take 40,000 troops to do this--it might take a couple of thousand and just like any manhunt, it would eventually come to an end with the culprit Dillingered and lying dead with a somewhat surprised look on his face.
Having chased the cruel Taliban out but not having won the hearts and minds of the Afghans (who knew?), we have now joined the long list of invaders who have been repulsed or who are about to be repulsed, or at least to go home in a military form of tatterdemallion, without having achieved any objective.
To be fair to the President, he never said he was hoping to pull out of Afghanistan. But that was then. There's no good reason to stay there. And you knew he couldn't have said he wanted to pull out of there anyway during the campaign because then McCain would have clenched his teeth even tighter and maybe even would have convinced someone that Obama would make a poor Commander in Chief.
I don't want to make this a referendum on Obama--but it's time to quit fooling with Afghanistan. To heck with what General McChrystal says. Nobody elected him. He's a fighting man and he's telling the boss what it would take to win.
But we don't need to win there, and should get out before they kill more American soldiers for no good reason. We should just focus on Bin Laden--that's all.
Support the Troops in Afghanistan. Time to come home.
--Renaissance
Friday, October 2, 2009
The Apparent Decline of Misu
Our family adopted a tiny, very pretty little black and white cat from a shelter in the suburbs in the summer of 2000. We named her Misu. And until earlier this summer when my daughter lobbied hard and with ultimate success for another "animal rescue" as she called it, Misu was the only feline and except for a brief cohabitation with a turtle that escaped upstate (don't ask) the only quadripedal non-human amongst us.
Misu has always been furtive--even rather retiring in nature. She is a house-cat, and has been known to lie in the same spot on the same couch for hours on end. She never has gone outside (except for one mad dash during a car-house transfer many years ago of which she rapidly thought better), and never has had long periods of interaction with other animals. Well, there was the turtle, covered by mesh that she often bothered; and the brief presence of goldfish whom she hunted, without success, by dipping her paw into the water over and over again. And perhaps as we might have taken better note, a month when a neighbor-cat stayed with us and left poor Misu utterly spooked and, I think, traumatized. It was a rescued alley-cat and was bolder than mild Misu, and Misu, though able to hold her own with back-arching and tail-fattening and hissing and bouncing sideways like a creature possessed, seemed altogether put out by the notion of having to share space with another un-caged animal.
Now there is Indy, a male, neutered of course, but full of youthful vigor and full of the classic curiosity with which cats are known to delight their masters. Misu's opinion of Indy is one of high-minded disdain, but this is also mixed with resentment towards us and, towards the newcomer, a total lack of camaraderie or good humor. Indy, a kitten now nearly full-sized, has tried to romp with Misu since the day of his arrival. Misu's response has been angry hissing and rapid retreat. Misu will not eat in Indy's presence. She tolerates Indy's physical proximity if she is drowsy, but not within a perimeter that appears to be approximately four or five feet in any direction. The two of them sometimes spend minutes at a time staring at each other, crouching as if to pounce.
That's all fascinating cat-drama. What seems sort of sad, and it may have to do with Misu's aging--she's now about nine, and certainly a middle-aged lady at this point--is her apparent overall decline in both attitude and vigor. She is more droopy than she once was, and has a tendency towards being short-tempered even with her humans, to whom she had always been indulgent. She also seems more afflicted with minor physical ailments than before. And it all seems to have coincided with the arrival of Indy.
My personal belief is that the arrival of Indy was a blow to Misu's delicate spirit and that she has not recovered. I think her mental condition is depleted, I think the stress Indy unwittingly causes is somewhat debilitating, and I think it has all brought on a physical frailty rather suddenly and, to me at least, quite noticeably. It's unfortunate that Misu has not been able to cope with the presence of what she clearly sees as a fierce rival, and her attendant decline has taken me by surprise and saddened me. She hides much more frequently now, and though she was often off in her own corner of pillows before, now she is almost never to be seen at all.
Misu's decline is perhaps inevitable but most unwelcome to see. For eight years she was ruler of the cat-domain. She seems to have abdicated, or at least retired. I would like to bring back the younger, more playful Misu but that of course is impossible. In the meantime there is Indy, who is a beautiful young cat with no shortage of cat-charisma. But it isn't the same.
Misu has always been furtive--even rather retiring in nature. She is a house-cat, and has been known to lie in the same spot on the same couch for hours on end. She never has gone outside (except for one mad dash during a car-house transfer many years ago of which she rapidly thought better), and never has had long periods of interaction with other animals. Well, there was the turtle, covered by mesh that she often bothered; and the brief presence of goldfish whom she hunted, without success, by dipping her paw into the water over and over again. And perhaps as we might have taken better note, a month when a neighbor-cat stayed with us and left poor Misu utterly spooked and, I think, traumatized. It was a rescued alley-cat and was bolder than mild Misu, and Misu, though able to hold her own with back-arching and tail-fattening and hissing and bouncing sideways like a creature possessed, seemed altogether put out by the notion of having to share space with another un-caged animal.
Now there is Indy, a male, neutered of course, but full of youthful vigor and full of the classic curiosity with which cats are known to delight their masters. Misu's opinion of Indy is one of high-minded disdain, but this is also mixed with resentment towards us and, towards the newcomer, a total lack of camaraderie or good humor. Indy, a kitten now nearly full-sized, has tried to romp with Misu since the day of his arrival. Misu's response has been angry hissing and rapid retreat. Misu will not eat in Indy's presence. She tolerates Indy's physical proximity if she is drowsy, but not within a perimeter that appears to be approximately four or five feet in any direction. The two of them sometimes spend minutes at a time staring at each other, crouching as if to pounce.
That's all fascinating cat-drama. What seems sort of sad, and it may have to do with Misu's aging--she's now about nine, and certainly a middle-aged lady at this point--is her apparent overall decline in both attitude and vigor. She is more droopy than she once was, and has a tendency towards being short-tempered even with her humans, to whom she had always been indulgent. She also seems more afflicted with minor physical ailments than before. And it all seems to have coincided with the arrival of Indy.
My personal belief is that the arrival of Indy was a blow to Misu's delicate spirit and that she has not recovered. I think her mental condition is depleted, I think the stress Indy unwittingly causes is somewhat debilitating, and I think it has all brought on a physical frailty rather suddenly and, to me at least, quite noticeably. It's unfortunate that Misu has not been able to cope with the presence of what she clearly sees as a fierce rival, and her attendant decline has taken me by surprise and saddened me. She hides much more frequently now, and though she was often off in her own corner of pillows before, now she is almost never to be seen at all.
Misu's decline is perhaps inevitable but most unwelcome to see. For eight years she was ruler of the cat-domain. She seems to have abdicated, or at least retired. I would like to bring back the younger, more playful Misu but that of course is impossible. In the meantime there is Indy, who is a beautiful young cat with no shortage of cat-charisma. But it isn't the same.
Friday, September 25, 2009
A Protest at My Child's High School
I know this will sound cryptic, but my child attends a well-regarded high school in a borough of the City of New York, and that is as specific as I am going to get about that subject.
But what I will get specific about is that there was a protest there yesterday.
It was a protest against the school. And it was a protest especially against the school's heretofore not-very-noteworthy (in NY at least) diversity. Apparently there are a great number of Asians, Arabs, Sikhs, Hindus, Jews, Persians, Hispanics, African-Americans, Albanians, Russians and heaven knows what other New York-ish sub-subcultural representatives prowling the halls of this wonderful school.
And apparently at least one group of outsiders, from somewhere in the great prairies of this nation, believes this is cause for alarm. This cult-like group--I think they are called "the Phelps Clan" or something like that--makes a point of protesting against progressivism in a manner the perversity of which I can only reluctantly begin to understand. For instance, they protested at the funeral of the young gay man who was beaten to death for being gay in Wyoming (they said he was going to hell). They have protested at the funerals of men and women soldiers killed in our current crop of overseas adventures (I have no idea why, but it seems perverse and wrong to do so).
And now they have taken their protests to the streets of the populous, incredibly diverse boroughs here in New York. I am not certain why they picked my child's high school, except that it is well known and as diverse as any in the city, but I think it's because it isn't very far from the synagogue at which they plan to protest on Saturday.
That's right. They are protesting against Jews in New York.
Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing that we must all celebrate. However, the meaning of it is often lost. Freedom of speech is attained via laws prohibiting the government from taking action against free speech; in other words, when the government is thereby prohibited from stopping people from saying what they want.
Freedom of speech is not about one individual making certain another individual gets to shoot his or her mouth off until everyone's ears are red.
So, armed with these facts, can we urge ourselves to perhaps find this clan of simpletons where they sleep and, with heavy complements of duct-tape, wrap their heads in it such that they cannot utter a word of protest against diversity?
I am looking for volunteers.
But what I will get specific about is that there was a protest there yesterday.
It was a protest against the school. And it was a protest especially against the school's heretofore not-very-noteworthy (in NY at least) diversity. Apparently there are a great number of Asians, Arabs, Sikhs, Hindus, Jews, Persians, Hispanics, African-Americans, Albanians, Russians and heaven knows what other New York-ish sub-subcultural representatives prowling the halls of this wonderful school.
And apparently at least one group of outsiders, from somewhere in the great prairies of this nation, believes this is cause for alarm. This cult-like group--I think they are called "the Phelps Clan" or something like that--makes a point of protesting against progressivism in a manner the perversity of which I can only reluctantly begin to understand. For instance, they protested at the funeral of the young gay man who was beaten to death for being gay in Wyoming (they said he was going to hell). They have protested at the funerals of men and women soldiers killed in our current crop of overseas adventures (I have no idea why, but it seems perverse and wrong to do so).
And now they have taken their protests to the streets of the populous, incredibly diverse boroughs here in New York. I am not certain why they picked my child's high school, except that it is well known and as diverse as any in the city, but I think it's because it isn't very far from the synagogue at which they plan to protest on Saturday.
That's right. They are protesting against Jews in New York.
Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing that we must all celebrate. However, the meaning of it is often lost. Freedom of speech is attained via laws prohibiting the government from taking action against free speech; in other words, when the government is thereby prohibited from stopping people from saying what they want.
Freedom of speech is not about one individual making certain another individual gets to shoot his or her mouth off until everyone's ears are red.
So, armed with these facts, can we urge ourselves to perhaps find this clan of simpletons where they sleep and, with heavy complements of duct-tape, wrap their heads in it such that they cannot utter a word of protest against diversity?
I am looking for volunteers.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Dear Abby: I'm Upset at my Ailing Old Father
Dear Abby:
I'm upset at my ailing old father.
Stop yelling. Let me explain.
First, the facts: he's in his eighties, is married, lives thousands of miles away from me, is legally blind, until recently did work (at a supermarket), and most recently fell at home and broke his hip. He is out of the hospital with a replacement joint and is convalescing at a rehabilitation center. I have two siblings. One of them is going to visit with him and my mother very shortly. On a recent call, my father, from his sickbed, informed me that he would be needing several hundred dollars a month from me and my siblings (combined)--for me, an affordable sum--because he could no longer work. My mother has not worked in many years though I believe she'd have been able to for most of that time.
Second, my immediate dilemma: should I go visit him? I have pressing business matters right now--no, really, I do. I'm not making that up.
Now, the background--and the reason I am upset. Or the reason I have been upset.
Without belaboring too much my distant past, let's just say that my parents provided a home in the suburbs that was unwelcoming enough for me, who by any stretch of the imagination should have been college-bound at the time, to leave first when I was seventeen and then, after having failed at leaving and a brief Harry-Potteresque residence in an unfinished space under a stairwell in their new home, to leave for good and forever when I had just turned eighteen with less than a thousand dollars to may name for some place I and my girlfriend at the time referred to as "out West".
That all worked out for me I guess. I have a business, a decent income, I am happily married with two wonderful children, one of them is in college, and my paintings are occasionally shown at galleries. My Dad says he is proud of me.
So here is the rub. My parents did little and nothing for me as a teenager. Of course I was difficult. I did things I would never want my teens to do (as who has not?). But they--I feel (and others who know the story agree)--had pretty much abandoned me, except for providing a crash pad and a chance to eat, by the time I was fourteen. (Example: I had a run-in with the cops when I was that age, during which I was victimized by same, and by the next day my parents had not only done nothing at all to address the event, they allowed me to go back out hitch-hiking).
As for the notion of college, there was virtually no conversation about it and certainly no offer of support from them (even at state schools which, as everyone knows, were, in the 1970s, cheap like penny candy).
Much, much more recently, through the twin wonders of social networking and email, I became embroiled in a very ugly exchange of "thoughts and feelings" between my brother, who initiated the episode with a spate of birther-worthy hate-speech, and my parents, whom my brother for no discernable good purpose cc'd during a heated email exchange in which he and I were both quite upset at one another mainly due to political differences. I had referenced some negative things about the family--and I suppose he wanted to wound me and them, and that began the emails between me and my mother and father.
In these emails I was, for the first time in perhaps thirty-five or forty years, very frank with them about my opinion of both their parenting skills and their--for lack of a better phrase I suppose--"belief system", which I hold to have been supported by a quite unwarranted self-satisfaction at how they have operated towards me for several decades. The emails were by turns bitter and defensive on their parts, and unusually frank and unsparing on mine.
We had left it as such until I got a call from my sister (a born-again Christian to whom I never speak) telling me that our father had fallen and was in the hospital.
I have spoken to him a few times. I now have a dilemma. I cannot say I especially want to go see him. But I cannot seem to avoid the very strong notion that, unless I do, I will deeply regret it.
Abby, what should I do?
Stop shouting. I know you're exhorting me to buy tickets. I may. I may, but I'm not sure I shall.
Signed,
Upset
I'm upset at my ailing old father.
Stop yelling. Let me explain.
First, the facts: he's in his eighties, is married, lives thousands of miles away from me, is legally blind, until recently did work (at a supermarket), and most recently fell at home and broke his hip. He is out of the hospital with a replacement joint and is convalescing at a rehabilitation center. I have two siblings. One of them is going to visit with him and my mother very shortly. On a recent call, my father, from his sickbed, informed me that he would be needing several hundred dollars a month from me and my siblings (combined)--for me, an affordable sum--because he could no longer work. My mother has not worked in many years though I believe she'd have been able to for most of that time.
Second, my immediate dilemma: should I go visit him? I have pressing business matters right now--no, really, I do. I'm not making that up.
Now, the background--and the reason I am upset. Or the reason I have been upset.
Without belaboring too much my distant past, let's just say that my parents provided a home in the suburbs that was unwelcoming enough for me, who by any stretch of the imagination should have been college-bound at the time, to leave first when I was seventeen and then, after having failed at leaving and a brief Harry-Potteresque residence in an unfinished space under a stairwell in their new home, to leave for good and forever when I had just turned eighteen with less than a thousand dollars to may name for some place I and my girlfriend at the time referred to as "out West".
That all worked out for me I guess. I have a business, a decent income, I am happily married with two wonderful children, one of them is in college, and my paintings are occasionally shown at galleries. My Dad says he is proud of me.
So here is the rub. My parents did little and nothing for me as a teenager. Of course I was difficult. I did things I would never want my teens to do (as who has not?). But they--I feel (and others who know the story agree)--had pretty much abandoned me, except for providing a crash pad and a chance to eat, by the time I was fourteen. (Example: I had a run-in with the cops when I was that age, during which I was victimized by same, and by the next day my parents had not only done nothing at all to address the event, they allowed me to go back out hitch-hiking).
As for the notion of college, there was virtually no conversation about it and certainly no offer of support from them (even at state schools which, as everyone knows, were, in the 1970s, cheap like penny candy).
Much, much more recently, through the twin wonders of social networking and email, I became embroiled in a very ugly exchange of "thoughts and feelings" between my brother, who initiated the episode with a spate of birther-worthy hate-speech, and my parents, whom my brother for no discernable good purpose cc'd during a heated email exchange in which he and I were both quite upset at one another mainly due to political differences. I had referenced some negative things about the family--and I suppose he wanted to wound me and them, and that began the emails between me and my mother and father.
In these emails I was, for the first time in perhaps thirty-five or forty years, very frank with them about my opinion of both their parenting skills and their--for lack of a better phrase I suppose--"belief system", which I hold to have been supported by a quite unwarranted self-satisfaction at how they have operated towards me for several decades. The emails were by turns bitter and defensive on their parts, and unusually frank and unsparing on mine.
We had left it as such until I got a call from my sister (a born-again Christian to whom I never speak) telling me that our father had fallen and was in the hospital.
I have spoken to him a few times. I now have a dilemma. I cannot say I especially want to go see him. But I cannot seem to avoid the very strong notion that, unless I do, I will deeply regret it.
Abby, what should I do?
Stop shouting. I know you're exhorting me to buy tickets. I may. I may, but I'm not sure I shall.
Signed,
Upset
Thursday, September 17, 2009
How Can Ya Be So Stupid?
I am talking about the so-called "working class" in this country. More narrowly, the white, self-identified "working stiffs" who probably don't belong to a union. Many are blue collar, some are gray collar, some certainly work in cubicles like girls at their sewing machines a century ago, very few are college educated, and nearly all have seen their economic prospects eroded--no, washed away--in a dam-burst of corporate exaltation and profit since the days when their first insidious hero, the now-underestimated Tricky Dick Nixon first bestrode them with a so-called "Southern Policy" that made the Republican party a manipulator of souls.
This post is inspired in part by Timothy Egan's "Working Class Zero" article in the NY Times today. But I have blogged of this working-class disconnect (or mis-connect) before.
My premise is that the American working class is easily in competition for the dumbest in the world, if "dumb" indicates an unquenchable thirst for doing what is diametrically opposed to one's self interest.
For instance, these sad Tea-Party buffoons that showed up in Washington last week: what was their purpose? Waving placards the collective sentiments of which ran the gamut from hate to contempt and back again to hate, they prompted me to ask myself if they had any clue what their actual message was, or if they knew what any coherent message might be. Did any of them seem to have a notion about what in public policy might in practice make their own lives better? Not a one, it seems. Much of the rhetoric was overtly racist (and many thanks to the Man from Plains for being plain-spoken about a very deeply shameful fact that even Obama wants to shrink from: that millions of American loathe him and his beautiful family because of the color of their skin). Race-hate seemed to be the message that got the most attention, whether the Tea-Baggers wanted it to or not. This alone makes my skin crawl, but let's not get too hung up on that just yet.
I imagine that astute observers around the world, especially those who've striven for "workers" over the long decades, including unionists, non-American centrists from large, industrial nations, socialists, and perhaps, if there are any who aren't thinking about nuking their neighbors due to their own brand of moronism, Communists, must be marveling at the overwhelming success the ruling class (roughly speaking) has had in dividing and conquering the peasants and serfs in the United States.
Where else are people who desperately need government regulation to keep themselves from being preyed on by giant conglomerates, instead spewing hate at "big government" and waving the flag for Capital? Where else are people who struggle to pay bills on the family Caravan deluded into thinking their taxation-policy should be in line with the taxation-policies that benefit those who pay with pocket change for their Bentley? Where else are people first robbed and cheated by a rapacious health-care industry literally from the cradle until the grave, then found crowding the airwaves with screeching-points written for them by the public relations experts employed by that very industry? Where else are people proudly betting their livelihoods and the livelihoods of their children on policies touting "self-reliance" and "faith" and "freedom" when what they are handed, once the race is run, a ticket worth little but an insecure, dead-end job in which they are totally dependent on plutocratic whimsy, not a nickel's worth of real assistance from their ermine-coated clergy, and a way of life constricted by prejudice, gun-violence, lack of access to facts, and only the mobility to traverse the lonely highways looking for the next town and the next job and the next mortgage?
For now, I will leave-off any discussion of the toxic form of Christianity that has taken hold of so many of these folks, for that is a subject both too deep and too complex to share space with any other. It is also a most wearying subject, and thinking about that plus the racist idiocy of the Tea-Baggers has left me in need of either a good strong drink or a restful nap.
I would like to say our nation can continue like this, with about forty percent of the country's populace living on a moonlet untethered to fact or any semblance of enlightened self-interest, but I don't think it can. The smart people won't always have an Obama to elect (and even he's got troubles in this environment); and it is in the cards that somehow, some way, a demagogue pandering to these Tea-Baggers will get put in the White House, and then heaven help us all.
Oh, wait. That already happened. I forgot, for a second, that George W. Bush had been President for eight most regrettable years. I guess I am afraid the next time it will be worse.
This post is inspired in part by Timothy Egan's "Working Class Zero" article in the NY Times today. But I have blogged of this working-class disconnect (or mis-connect) before.
My premise is that the American working class is easily in competition for the dumbest in the world, if "dumb" indicates an unquenchable thirst for doing what is diametrically opposed to one's self interest.
For instance, these sad Tea-Party buffoons that showed up in Washington last week: what was their purpose? Waving placards the collective sentiments of which ran the gamut from hate to contempt and back again to hate, they prompted me to ask myself if they had any clue what their actual message was, or if they knew what any coherent message might be. Did any of them seem to have a notion about what in public policy might in practice make their own lives better? Not a one, it seems. Much of the rhetoric was overtly racist (and many thanks to the Man from Plains for being plain-spoken about a very deeply shameful fact that even Obama wants to shrink from: that millions of American loathe him and his beautiful family because of the color of their skin). Race-hate seemed to be the message that got the most attention, whether the Tea-Baggers wanted it to or not. This alone makes my skin crawl, but let's not get too hung up on that just yet.
I imagine that astute observers around the world, especially those who've striven for "workers" over the long decades, including unionists, non-American centrists from large, industrial nations, socialists, and perhaps, if there are any who aren't thinking about nuking their neighbors due to their own brand of moronism, Communists, must be marveling at the overwhelming success the ruling class (roughly speaking) has had in dividing and conquering the peasants and serfs in the United States.
Where else are people who desperately need government regulation to keep themselves from being preyed on by giant conglomerates, instead spewing hate at "big government" and waving the flag for Capital? Where else are people who struggle to pay bills on the family Caravan deluded into thinking their taxation-policy should be in line with the taxation-policies that benefit those who pay with pocket change for their Bentley? Where else are people first robbed and cheated by a rapacious health-care industry literally from the cradle until the grave, then found crowding the airwaves with screeching-points written for them by the public relations experts employed by that very industry? Where else are people proudly betting their livelihoods and the livelihoods of their children on policies touting "self-reliance" and "faith" and "freedom" when what they are handed, once the race is run, a ticket worth little but an insecure, dead-end job in which they are totally dependent on plutocratic whimsy, not a nickel's worth of real assistance from their ermine-coated clergy, and a way of life constricted by prejudice, gun-violence, lack of access to facts, and only the mobility to traverse the lonely highways looking for the next town and the next job and the next mortgage?
For now, I will leave-off any discussion of the toxic form of Christianity that has taken hold of so many of these folks, for that is a subject both too deep and too complex to share space with any other. It is also a most wearying subject, and thinking about that plus the racist idiocy of the Tea-Baggers has left me in need of either a good strong drink or a restful nap.
I would like to say our nation can continue like this, with about forty percent of the country's populace living on a moonlet untethered to fact or any semblance of enlightened self-interest, but I don't think it can. The smart people won't always have an Obama to elect (and even he's got troubles in this environment); and it is in the cards that somehow, some way, a demagogue pandering to these Tea-Baggers will get put in the White House, and then heaven help us all.
Oh, wait. That already happened. I forgot, for a second, that George W. Bush had been President for eight most regrettable years. I guess I am afraid the next time it will be worse.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
That Lady that Drove the Wrong Way on the Parkway
For those of you who live either far away from the Hudson Valley or have been sailing 'round the world in a one-person craft the past couple of months, I am talking about the woman who got onto the Taconic State Parkway going in the wrong direction with a carload full of kids, drove several miles in the wrong direction (in the fast lane of oncoming traffic), then crashed and killed everybody in the car including herself and a couple of others in an oncoming car.
They said at first she had been "disoriented" and had called her brother (not her husband) and he had told her to stay off the road. She didn't listen.
Then they said she drank a half-gallon of vodka, smoked several joints and was as wild as a polecat when she got on the highway.
In either case, the result was a near-incredible tragedy the horror of which one struggles to contemplate.
Me, I am not buying the drunk-as-a-skunk business. I know we'll probably never know, but there's got to be more going on (a stroke?) when you are observed getting into a car sober (full of kids), then make a call that you're not feeling well, then commit a colossal and fatal error (or not!) that seems to have bordered on the far fringe of madness.
Can I picture the Long Island mom with her and her neighbor's kids in the car, chugging the hard stuff and smoking like Bob Marley somewhere between the exit for Poughkeepsie and the one for Garrison? Frankly I cannot. It doesn't "feel" plausible--that's all I can say about it.
I think the cops wanted to "solve the mystery" in a big hurry and so they did. I'm not saying there might not have been alcohol in her and I'm not saying there might not have been THC in her. I'm saying I can't imagine how she could have gotten that drunk and stoned that fast, and that this made her drive the wrong way on a parkway for several miles until dead.
They should probably exhume the poor woman and get some further testing done. And my heart goes out to all those who lost someone in this epochal automobile tragedy.
They said at first she had been "disoriented" and had called her brother (not her husband) and he had told her to stay off the road. She didn't listen.
Then they said she drank a half-gallon of vodka, smoked several joints and was as wild as a polecat when she got on the highway.
In either case, the result was a near-incredible tragedy the horror of which one struggles to contemplate.
Me, I am not buying the drunk-as-a-skunk business. I know we'll probably never know, but there's got to be more going on (a stroke?) when you are observed getting into a car sober (full of kids), then make a call that you're not feeling well, then commit a colossal and fatal error (or not!) that seems to have bordered on the far fringe of madness.
Can I picture the Long Island mom with her and her neighbor's kids in the car, chugging the hard stuff and smoking like Bob Marley somewhere between the exit for Poughkeepsie and the one for Garrison? Frankly I cannot. It doesn't "feel" plausible--that's all I can say about it.
I think the cops wanted to "solve the mystery" in a big hurry and so they did. I'm not saying there might not have been alcohol in her and I'm not saying there might not have been THC in her. I'm saying I can't imagine how she could have gotten that drunk and stoned that fast, and that this made her drive the wrong way on a parkway for several miles until dead.
They should probably exhume the poor woman and get some further testing done. And my heart goes out to all those who lost someone in this epochal automobile tragedy.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Yesterday I Saw an Orange Leaf
A friend of mine who grew up in the Midwest says that after living here in the Northeast for several years, he observes that on September 1, the light changes, the air changes, and everything about summer begins to wane rapidly.
I still keep trying to tell myself it's psychological conditioning (back to school--all that stuff); but there is always, for me, a wistful quality to early September and I believe my friend's insight about the angle of light, coupled with the onset of no-longer-deniably shorter days, has something to do with it.
I have already blogged about how winter excites in me a seething hate bordering on that of the birthers for Obama. I have unfortunately allowed that hate to overflow into a near-dislike of everyone's favorite season (fall) on grounds that it is simply an early phase of winter and harbinger of much worse to come (weatherwise).
Now that we have been handed a summer generally so wet it might have been able to confuse the Creature from the Black Lagoon into relaxing on my front porch thinking he was still underwater, I feel like I must fight to deny fall any toehold--the better to forestall the onset of the great unhappy freeze that reduces the Northeast to a soggy, sad excuse for staying indoors and looking at art and watching movies instead of, say, roasting kielbasa over a propane fire.
Hence my denial of all signs of the arrival of a season not called summer but that inevitably seems to follow it in the seasonal cycle. Perhaps perversely, I have therefore grown keen-eyed in my scan of the summerscape, looking for signs of decay. For several days into September I saw no change. Even a patch of new grass seed I had recently laid had sprung and grew thick and yet wispy like the hair of a green young angel. Even until today there has still been no thought of needing a thing called "jacket".
But yesterday, on my way back from the County Fair up in the Hudson Valley, I spotted, quite suddenly and in a place it had certainly not been noticed the day before, a tree with leaves beginning to turn orange. I caught my breath. Summer was beginning to fail me--faithless, green summer now beginning its long swoon to the crackling ice and black sucking mud and the dark, unforgiving days of winter. In summer, people can picnic in the woods. In winter, people who are stuck in the woods freeze to death. Freeze to death! Winter is an indignity not to be borne without strong resentment.
And now we are on our way. The leaves have (in the Hudson Valley anyway) begun to turn. Before we know it, we'll be trying to keep our ears warm (a ridiculous notion!).
I am determined to remain in denial for at least several more days. I think I can last until the twentieth of the month. Then, kicking orange leaves with my boot, I will have to think about raking them and piling them and to begin counting the long days until spring.
--Renaissance
I still keep trying to tell myself it's psychological conditioning (back to school--all that stuff); but there is always, for me, a wistful quality to early September and I believe my friend's insight about the angle of light, coupled with the onset of no-longer-deniably shorter days, has something to do with it.
I have already blogged about how winter excites in me a seething hate bordering on that of the birthers for Obama. I have unfortunately allowed that hate to overflow into a near-dislike of everyone's favorite season (fall) on grounds that it is simply an early phase of winter and harbinger of much worse to come (weatherwise).
Now that we have been handed a summer generally so wet it might have been able to confuse the Creature from the Black Lagoon into relaxing on my front porch thinking he was still underwater, I feel like I must fight to deny fall any toehold--the better to forestall the onset of the great unhappy freeze that reduces the Northeast to a soggy, sad excuse for staying indoors and looking at art and watching movies instead of, say, roasting kielbasa over a propane fire.
Hence my denial of all signs of the arrival of a season not called summer but that inevitably seems to follow it in the seasonal cycle. Perhaps perversely, I have therefore grown keen-eyed in my scan of the summerscape, looking for signs of decay. For several days into September I saw no change. Even a patch of new grass seed I had recently laid had sprung and grew thick and yet wispy like the hair of a green young angel. Even until today there has still been no thought of needing a thing called "jacket".
But yesterday, on my way back from the County Fair up in the Hudson Valley, I spotted, quite suddenly and in a place it had certainly not been noticed the day before, a tree with leaves beginning to turn orange. I caught my breath. Summer was beginning to fail me--faithless, green summer now beginning its long swoon to the crackling ice and black sucking mud and the dark, unforgiving days of winter. In summer, people can picnic in the woods. In winter, people who are stuck in the woods freeze to death. Freeze to death! Winter is an indignity not to be borne without strong resentment.
And now we are on our way. The leaves have (in the Hudson Valley anyway) begun to turn. Before we know it, we'll be trying to keep our ears warm (a ridiculous notion!).
I am determined to remain in denial for at least several more days. I think I can last until the twentieth of the month. Then, kicking orange leaves with my boot, I will have to think about raking them and piling them and to begin counting the long days until spring.
--Renaissance
Where is the California Car Genius?
Or genii as I am pretty sure the plural is written.
It has long been evident (to me at least) that part of the reason the American car industry has crashed like a Mastodon on thin ice is because it looks for its creative spark in, of all places, Detroit.
I don't have anything against Detroit. I wish it were a better place. It happens to be a bad place--one of the worst cities in the United States. Does anyone with world-class creative juices, connections, or even just iPod-like coolness live there, or want to live there? I know I am going to sound parochial by saying it, but I suspect the answer is "no". Or if they do live there, they are hurting to leave (didn't Madonna grow up near Detroit--and scrammed as a youth for a flophouse in the junkiest part of Manhattan?). You will argue that it produced tailfins and huge engines and large success for many years. I will say I agree, but that the Pinto and the Aspen and the Suburban have long buried that glory in a mound of disgraceful and now very disfavored automotive junk.
So we are expecting a city with a wretched recent history, zero creativity and all the verve of a bag full of jello and marshmallows to come up with the next great automotive idea? Don't bet the house on that. Don't bet a nickel. They may be able to build them there--but they sure as heck don't seem much able to design them there.
That's where the Golden State comes in. After all, where would Detroit be without Los Angeles to buy Cobalts and Magnums and Azteks by the boatload? How many cars do Californians buy a year? I don't know--but it is a sick number I am certain. So why don't the folks up along Sand Hill Road recruit the next Bid Daddy Roth and come up with some butt-kicking car ideas and ramp up a company kind of the way they did with software? Kind of like the dreamers in Hollywood came up with Titanic and Coraline and the cinematic version of Chicago? How about combining the best of California--entrepreneurship, a taste for the greener choices in life (and I don't mean just money) plus the old razzle-dazzle--and putting that considerable energy and money and brainpower behind a new automotive industry?
Do I think it can happen overnight? No. Do I think that in twenty years we'd be driving 150mpg cars that look like Excellence on Wheels, and for which the world will clamor (the way it does for software and movies)? I do.
I know California's not exactly in great shape these days either. But on its worst day, it's got about a thousand percent better chance of coming up with a winner than the Glyptodonts in Michigan who've spent the last forty years lying and dying and losing and snoozing.
--Renaissance
It has long been evident (to me at least) that part of the reason the American car industry has crashed like a Mastodon on thin ice is because it looks for its creative spark in, of all places, Detroit.
I don't have anything against Detroit. I wish it were a better place. It happens to be a bad place--one of the worst cities in the United States. Does anyone with world-class creative juices, connections, or even just iPod-like coolness live there, or want to live there? I know I am going to sound parochial by saying it, but I suspect the answer is "no". Or if they do live there, they are hurting to leave (didn't Madonna grow up near Detroit--and scrammed as a youth for a flophouse in the junkiest part of Manhattan?). You will argue that it produced tailfins and huge engines and large success for many years. I will say I agree, but that the Pinto and the Aspen and the Suburban have long buried that glory in a mound of disgraceful and now very disfavored automotive junk.
So we are expecting a city with a wretched recent history, zero creativity and all the verve of a bag full of jello and marshmallows to come up with the next great automotive idea? Don't bet the house on that. Don't bet a nickel. They may be able to build them there--but they sure as heck don't seem much able to design them there.
That's where the Golden State comes in. After all, where would Detroit be without Los Angeles to buy Cobalts and Magnums and Azteks by the boatload? How many cars do Californians buy a year? I don't know--but it is a sick number I am certain. So why don't the folks up along Sand Hill Road recruit the next Bid Daddy Roth and come up with some butt-kicking car ideas and ramp up a company kind of the way they did with software? Kind of like the dreamers in Hollywood came up with Titanic and Coraline and the cinematic version of Chicago? How about combining the best of California--entrepreneurship, a taste for the greener choices in life (and I don't mean just money) plus the old razzle-dazzle--and putting that considerable energy and money and brainpower behind a new automotive industry?
Do I think it can happen overnight? No. Do I think that in twenty years we'd be driving 150mpg cars that look like Excellence on Wheels, and for which the world will clamor (the way it does for software and movies)? I do.
I know California's not exactly in great shape these days either. But on its worst day, it's got about a thousand percent better chance of coming up with a winner than the Glyptodonts in Michigan who've spent the last forty years lying and dying and losing and snoozing.
--Renaissance
Monday, August 24, 2009
How Does Anyone Stomach the Purchase of a New Car?
I am driving a car with a hundred thousand miles on it. I happen to like it and take pretty good care of it. It's one of those 4-cylinder ugly-cute hybrids that the Japanese seem so good at making, and you can pretend it's an SUV on some days but you don't have to pay for all the gas you'd need if you had the real thing.
One day I thought I'd see about getting a sedan from the same company--I like sedans, too, and I like it when they are pretty sleek and pretty good on gas. So I went to a dealer whose name seemed to profess a propensity for being Friendly, not expecting them to be anything but ordinary and somewhat on the slimy side.
I came away with my convictions intact: I find it hard to believe that anyone can stomach the purchase of a new car except very rarely or when one really needs to do so.
Of course, I started my research on-line and found out that leases were going off at two-twenty nine a month and that my car had a blue-book value of around sixty-five hundred bucks. The amount owed to the bank was a little less than that amount. Perhaps perversely, I wanted them to take my car instead of the up-front fees they usually ask for (a couple of grand) to get the lease started.
Maybe this is what doomed the transaction from the start. But I got the distinct impression that the dealership expected to relieve me of my vehicle for considerably less than it was worth, sell it for considerably more than it was worth, and still make me pay full freight on the lease. Why not?
The offense is in the way this transparent unfairness is often tricked up by car dealers. I think they believe their customers must be idiots (because buying a new car is inherently stupid?--I don't know).
It started with the salesperson telling me that a certain "he" had said my perfectly presentable car was "in rough shape" and that they couldn't come anywhere near blue-book. When I pointed out the difference in dollars and cents, I was told that "he" would not "insult me" with an offer that approached the blue-book value. Also, that the blue-book "didn't really follow the market", which was an amazing thing to say about the industry-standard price guide.
I figured this combination of reverse terminology and outright denial of fact must be part of the not-so-subtle bag of tricks the salesperson deploys to confuse the buyer. It confused me, but only in the sense that I wasn't sure if it was a trick or if the salesperson might be running low on batteries somehow. The resultant lease offer was fully more than a hundred dollars a month more than my research had suggested it might cost (and what the company's national advertising campaign proclaimed).
Then came the math part. "Even if I could get you another thousand" on the car, it would only bring the price down by thirty dollars. On the other hand, if I paid them two thousand up front, the price would come down by at least a hundred dollars--a three-to-one ratio in their favor.
I asked what happened to the two-twenty-nine, since we weren't even close. "Where did you see that?" It was as if I had brought in a dead rat and had asked to have it appraised. That it had been seen in a "national advertising campaign" was treated as if it had been transmitted to me by aliens in a heiroglyph unreadable in the car-dealership domain.
This led me to the conclusion that they had no need to sell a car to me, and I shook hands with their salesperson and left.
I may hang on to my car for another hundred thousand miles. It may be less insulting to my pride to drive around in a dented old rustbucket than to feel the chill of car-dealer slime applied liberally about my head and shoulders any time soon.
So my question remains: how can anyone put up with it? No other type of transaction is ever as rife with chicanery. How do they sell even a single car except to the careless, desperate or innocent? I will continue to ponder.
--Renaissance
One day I thought I'd see about getting a sedan from the same company--I like sedans, too, and I like it when they are pretty sleek and pretty good on gas. So I went to a dealer whose name seemed to profess a propensity for being Friendly, not expecting them to be anything but ordinary and somewhat on the slimy side.
I came away with my convictions intact: I find it hard to believe that anyone can stomach the purchase of a new car except very rarely or when one really needs to do so.
Of course, I started my research on-line and found out that leases were going off at two-twenty nine a month and that my car had a blue-book value of around sixty-five hundred bucks. The amount owed to the bank was a little less than that amount. Perhaps perversely, I wanted them to take my car instead of the up-front fees they usually ask for (a couple of grand) to get the lease started.
Maybe this is what doomed the transaction from the start. But I got the distinct impression that the dealership expected to relieve me of my vehicle for considerably less than it was worth, sell it for considerably more than it was worth, and still make me pay full freight on the lease. Why not?
The offense is in the way this transparent unfairness is often tricked up by car dealers. I think they believe their customers must be idiots (because buying a new car is inherently stupid?--I don't know).
It started with the salesperson telling me that a certain "he" had said my perfectly presentable car was "in rough shape" and that they couldn't come anywhere near blue-book. When I pointed out the difference in dollars and cents, I was told that "he" would not "insult me" with an offer that approached the blue-book value. Also, that the blue-book "didn't really follow the market", which was an amazing thing to say about the industry-standard price guide.
I figured this combination of reverse terminology and outright denial of fact must be part of the not-so-subtle bag of tricks the salesperson deploys to confuse the buyer. It confused me, but only in the sense that I wasn't sure if it was a trick or if the salesperson might be running low on batteries somehow. The resultant lease offer was fully more than a hundred dollars a month more than my research had suggested it might cost (and what the company's national advertising campaign proclaimed).
Then came the math part. "Even if I could get you another thousand" on the car, it would only bring the price down by thirty dollars. On the other hand, if I paid them two thousand up front, the price would come down by at least a hundred dollars--a three-to-one ratio in their favor.
I asked what happened to the two-twenty-nine, since we weren't even close. "Where did you see that?" It was as if I had brought in a dead rat and had asked to have it appraised. That it had been seen in a "national advertising campaign" was treated as if it had been transmitted to me by aliens in a heiroglyph unreadable in the car-dealership domain.
This led me to the conclusion that they had no need to sell a car to me, and I shook hands with their salesperson and left.
I may hang on to my car for another hundred thousand miles. It may be less insulting to my pride to drive around in a dented old rustbucket than to feel the chill of car-dealer slime applied liberally about my head and shoulders any time soon.
So my question remains: how can anyone put up with it? No other type of transaction is ever as rife with chicanery. How do they sell even a single car except to the careless, desperate or innocent? I will continue to ponder.
--Renaissance
Howard Stern: What a Chump!
Remember "The King of All Media" with his easy sneer and his Quivering sidekick, making fun of big boobs and retards and minorities and talking about dicks and farts and occasionally about politics as if anyone cared what he thought about anything but the way he described the nether cheeks of any of a dozen visiting whores and cum-bunnies?
Remember how he was always picking on the easiest targets, and how he always got away with sneering at people who were truly different by hiding behind his self-professed ugliness, gratuitously his Jewishness, and the platitudinous Negritude of his helpmate?
Remember how he seemed to be the voice of every teen boy and undersexed twenty and thirty something male in the whole wide universe? How he made it seem, if you squinted hard (really, really hard), that it might be cool to be a wisecracking nobody with no friends and nothing better to do than snarl and chuckle and hope that some chick will do something dirty for you without you having to pay?
Remember his front-page battles with the mean-old government that wanted to keep him from cursing on-air? And then how he figured he'd get the last laugh by doing his show the way he'd always wanted to do it? On satellite radio? With, like, twelve people listening?
Well, I am sure he's sulking all the way to the mouse-click that shows him his hefty bank balance, but can it really be the case that in a very short time indeed, he has become totally, utterly, incontrovertibly irrelevant?
When was the last time you heard anyone--I mean anyone at all--mention good old Howard Stern? Does he still have a show on satellite radio? Is there such a thing as satellite radio anymore?
Isn't it wonderful how the world's biggest jackasses so often end up tripping over their own big floppy egos and landing face down in a lonesome puddle at the end of the field where nobody's watching anymore?
If only Rush Limbowel would go where Stern went. But he's never made the mistake of overestimating his viewers. He knows they wouldn't bother to buy into some cockamaimie monthly service plan just to hear his drivel.
Poor Howard. Where do you suppose he stands on the Health Care issue? I'm sure he'd think of something dirty to say about it. But it's too late. Nobody cares what he says. Not one person.
--Renaissance
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Remember how he was always picking on the easiest targets, and how he always got away with sneering at people who were truly different by hiding behind his self-professed ugliness, gratuitously his Jewishness, and the platitudinous Negritude of his helpmate?
Remember how he seemed to be the voice of every teen boy and undersexed twenty and thirty something male in the whole wide universe? How he made it seem, if you squinted hard (really, really hard), that it might be cool to be a wisecracking nobody with no friends and nothing better to do than snarl and chuckle and hope that some chick will do something dirty for you without you having to pay?
Remember his front-page battles with the mean-old government that wanted to keep him from cursing on-air? And then how he figured he'd get the last laugh by doing his show the way he'd always wanted to do it? On satellite radio? With, like, twelve people listening?
Well, I am sure he's sulking all the way to the mouse-click that shows him his hefty bank balance, but can it really be the case that in a very short time indeed, he has become totally, utterly, incontrovertibly irrelevant?
When was the last time you heard anyone--I mean anyone at all--mention good old Howard Stern? Does he still have a show on satellite radio? Is there such a thing as satellite radio anymore?
Isn't it wonderful how the world's biggest jackasses so often end up tripping over their own big floppy egos and landing face down in a lonesome puddle at the end of the field where nobody's watching anymore?
If only Rush Limbowel would go where Stern went. But he's never made the mistake of overestimating his viewers. He knows they wouldn't bother to buy into some cockamaimie monthly service plan just to hear his drivel.
Poor Howard. Where do you suppose he stands on the Health Care issue? I'm sure he'd think of something dirty to say about it. But it's too late. Nobody cares what he says. Not one person.
--Renaissance
Thursday, August 20, 2009
In Support of Poets
I am in full agreement with the economic analysis put forth in the most recent All Poets Are Thieves posting.
I moved to Manhattan when no one (apparently) wanted to be here and got an admittedly rather crummy apartment for a hundred and fifty dollars a month. If that same apartment today were not ten times as expensive--maybe more--I would be shocked.
Today, the notion that one is young, ambitious, creative and pretty broke yet able to find a home in the canyons of the great City of Dreams, is chimerical. Even as rents fall by fifteen and twenty percent (at most), the city, and especially Manhattan, is still held in a white-knuckled grip by landlords (and co-op owners and condo-owners to a lesser extent)who seek crazily to drive every penny of profit out of each and every livable space between the Battery and Spuyten Duyvil (and beyond).
This did not happen in a vacuum. Certain large areas of Manhattan were, for a long enough time, a bargain for the creative minds that powered it--until there were enough of them to crowd out the junkies, thieves, creeps, drunks and filthy whackos that used to lard the populace and help keep the whole place somewhat on edge and somewhat undesirable to those seeking a proper, hassle-free lifestyle. Many of those who arrived as broke creatives became loft-owners and wanted nothing less than a hassle-free lifestyle and then fully supported the various crackdowns and price-runs that eventually created a city that now resembles the city of old only in its pace and its linear height.
So many of the old charms (yes, charms) of Manhattan are now gone. Small, cranky shops that could be found nowhere else are now nowhere to be found. Does anyone remember places like Magickal Childe where you could buy henbane and skulls, or 13th Street Lumber where you could buy pieces of wood small enough to carry home yourself? One could go on--the loss of diners, the loss of bookstores, the loss of non-chain-store coffee shops, the loss of cheap junk shops with really cool stuff in them--in essence, the loss of uniqueness that made Manhattan a place where one could manage to live well and cheaply and just beyond the clutches of landowners and great corporations that had moved to the suburbs.
Manhattan today, even as it suffers a severe economic downturn, is no place for the young dreamer of little means. Today's rag-tag dreamer has become a victim of a previous generation of dreamers' success. This is terribly sad. But young dreamers will find their own places--some have gone to the Hudson Valley for instance, and some to still-marginal sections of the boroughs (not including Williamsburgh which is well-trodden and unjustifiably expensive). Manhattan will be the richer, but also much the poorer--and certainly far, far less interesting.
--Renaissance
Friday, August 14, 2009
I moved to Manhattan when no one (apparently) wanted to be here and got an admittedly rather crummy apartment for a hundred and fifty dollars a month. If that same apartment today were not ten times as expensive--maybe more--I would be shocked.
Today, the notion that one is young, ambitious, creative and pretty broke yet able to find a home in the canyons of the great City of Dreams, is chimerical. Even as rents fall by fifteen and twenty percent (at most), the city, and especially Manhattan, is still held in a white-knuckled grip by landlords (and co-op owners and condo-owners to a lesser extent)who seek crazily to drive every penny of profit out of each and every livable space between the Battery and Spuyten Duyvil (and beyond).
This did not happen in a vacuum. Certain large areas of Manhattan were, for a long enough time, a bargain for the creative minds that powered it--until there were enough of them to crowd out the junkies, thieves, creeps, drunks and filthy whackos that used to lard the populace and help keep the whole place somewhat on edge and somewhat undesirable to those seeking a proper, hassle-free lifestyle. Many of those who arrived as broke creatives became loft-owners and wanted nothing less than a hassle-free lifestyle and then fully supported the various crackdowns and price-runs that eventually created a city that now resembles the city of old only in its pace and its linear height.
So many of the old charms (yes, charms) of Manhattan are now gone. Small, cranky shops that could be found nowhere else are now nowhere to be found. Does anyone remember places like Magickal Childe where you could buy henbane and skulls, or 13th Street Lumber where you could buy pieces of wood small enough to carry home yourself? One could go on--the loss of diners, the loss of bookstores, the loss of non-chain-store coffee shops, the loss of cheap junk shops with really cool stuff in them--in essence, the loss of uniqueness that made Manhattan a place where one could manage to live well and cheaply and just beyond the clutches of landowners and great corporations that had moved to the suburbs.
Manhattan today, even as it suffers a severe economic downturn, is no place for the young dreamer of little means. Today's rag-tag dreamer has become a victim of a previous generation of dreamers' success. This is terribly sad. But young dreamers will find their own places--some have gone to the Hudson Valley for instance, and some to still-marginal sections of the boroughs (not including Williamsburgh which is well-trodden and unjustifiably expensive). Manhattan will be the richer, but also much the poorer--and certainly far, far less interesting.
--Renaissance
Friday, August 14, 2009
The Abject Failure of Existing Government Health Care
We know it mostly as "Medicare" and it's for old folks. It doesn't cost anything. It's run by the government. By all accounts, it is a 100% failure.
In fact, by every account I know of, it is universally lethal. Have you heard of any old person ever having survived the onslaught of Medicare's pill-slinging, hipbone-setting, cardiac-massaging minions? Of course not. Every single old person under its care ends up dying. This is a great tragedy--an American holocaust. But of course no one--not even anti-government teabaggers--dares talk about it. This is because everyone knows that one day, they too will end up in the deadly clutches of Medicare. Evidently they are hoping their silence will buy them an extra few years before, in its mysterious, inexorable way, Medicare oversees their death.
The worst part of Medicare is that everyone gets it. If you were poor and uninsured at 64, you are, when you turn 65, still poor but also in the deadly grip of Medicare. And you have no hope of survival. Seniors, frightened and intimidated by the certain death awaiting them at the hands of Medicare, say nothing. The quietest among them accept the care for many years--and survive sometimes to celebrate their one hundredth birthday. But no one survives much past their centenary.
Who knows how long seniors might live without this deadly government program? A hundred and ten? A hundred and twenty-five? A hundred and seventy-five? Five hundred? Have we no right to find out? Of course not. The government has made certain there are no survivors.
Take heed, America. The silent acceptance of Medicare by seniors is evidence enough. They are too frightened to tell you what it's like to have free medical care from the government--too scared to tell you that it will eventually kill you.
--Renaissance
Saturday, August 01, 2009
In fact, by every account I know of, it is universally lethal. Have you heard of any old person ever having survived the onslaught of Medicare's pill-slinging, hipbone-setting, cardiac-massaging minions? Of course not. Every single old person under its care ends up dying. This is a great tragedy--an American holocaust. But of course no one--not even anti-government teabaggers--dares talk about it. This is because everyone knows that one day, they too will end up in the deadly clutches of Medicare. Evidently they are hoping their silence will buy them an extra few years before, in its mysterious, inexorable way, Medicare oversees their death.
The worst part of Medicare is that everyone gets it. If you were poor and uninsured at 64, you are, when you turn 65, still poor but also in the deadly grip of Medicare. And you have no hope of survival. Seniors, frightened and intimidated by the certain death awaiting them at the hands of Medicare, say nothing. The quietest among them accept the care for many years--and survive sometimes to celebrate their one hundredth birthday. But no one survives much past their centenary.
Who knows how long seniors might live without this deadly government program? A hundred and ten? A hundred and twenty-five? A hundred and seventy-five? Five hundred? Have we no right to find out? Of course not. The government has made certain there are no survivors.
Take heed, America. The silent acceptance of Medicare by seniors is evidence enough. They are too frightened to tell you what it's like to have free medical care from the government--too scared to tell you that it will eventually kill you.
--Renaissance
Saturday, August 01, 2009
If I were in My Home and. . .
If I were in my home and, having shown I.D. to a policeman or woman proving I lived there and was not wanted on an outstanding charge, I would expect them to leave on the double and issue a public servant-like apology for having wasted my time. I would expect to accept their apology, but, while it might be nice of me to be nice about it, I would be under no legal restraint to keep my mouth shut in any way, shape or form.
Of course the charges were dropped (in Cambridge, against Professor Gates, if you have been skindiving in Tuvalu for the past week)! "The Cambridge Police acted stupidly". Obama got it right the first time (he usually does).
This may be about race as much as anything else, but to me it is more about a citizen's constitutional right to privacy and the limits of police power.
The police were right in investigating the 911 call. As a citizen, I would want them to respond to a possible break-in at my home. That said, the citizen is under no obligation to be polite in his/her own home in order to avoid arrest. This is where the cops got stupid.
Of course Gates was unwise to have been shouting at the police. Of course the police account is at odds with the facts in a manner supporting police rectitude. These are human beings looking out for themselves.
But here we must stand fast against an obvious tramping upon a citizen's right to privacy. A policeman no longer in pursuit of a criminal on private property has no reason to be present upon said private property. Much less should he/she have an expectation that the citizen owes him/her some sort of "respect" or even "politeness". And especially not so as to avoid arrest.
The notion that the Cambridge police felt endangered by Gates in a manner requiring the application of handcuffs, or that there was "tumultuous behavior in a public space" beggars belief. Once the cops had seen his ID as proof of residence, it was time to go--with a handshake or under a hail of invective. The citizen in the case had no responsibility to politeness towards anyone, and that included the police.
Anyone dragged out of their own house in handcuffs having done nothing but perhaps yell at a cop has a right to be awfully annoyed. I am bound to wonder what will come out of Obama's post-racial cocktail party--I hope it includes an admission from the cop that he really ought'n't've arrested the guy.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Of course the charges were dropped (in Cambridge, against Professor Gates, if you have been skindiving in Tuvalu for the past week)! "The Cambridge Police acted stupidly". Obama got it right the first time (he usually does).
This may be about race as much as anything else, but to me it is more about a citizen's constitutional right to privacy and the limits of police power.
The police were right in investigating the 911 call. As a citizen, I would want them to respond to a possible break-in at my home. That said, the citizen is under no obligation to be polite in his/her own home in order to avoid arrest. This is where the cops got stupid.
Of course Gates was unwise to have been shouting at the police. Of course the police account is at odds with the facts in a manner supporting police rectitude. These are human beings looking out for themselves.
But here we must stand fast against an obvious tramping upon a citizen's right to privacy. A policeman no longer in pursuit of a criminal on private property has no reason to be present upon said private property. Much less should he/she have an expectation that the citizen owes him/her some sort of "respect" or even "politeness". And especially not so as to avoid arrest.
The notion that the Cambridge police felt endangered by Gates in a manner requiring the application of handcuffs, or that there was "tumultuous behavior in a public space" beggars belief. Once the cops had seen his ID as proof of residence, it was time to go--with a handshake or under a hail of invective. The citizen in the case had no responsibility to politeness towards anyone, and that included the police.
Anyone dragged out of their own house in handcuffs having done nothing but perhaps yell at a cop has a right to be awfully annoyed. I am bound to wonder what will come out of Obama's post-racial cocktail party--I hope it includes an admission from the cop that he really ought'n't've arrested the guy.
--Renaissance
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
My Favorite Stationery Store
That's right, it's spelled with an "e". How many times have you seen that word spelled with an "a" as if it were describing something that is remaining in the same place? These days, probably more often than not.
But a stationery store, while usually stationary, is spelled with an "e", and in a world of Staples and Office World and of course Wal Mart, the stationery store often goes the way of the passenger pigeon.
I do, however, know of one that has managed to outlast the local Staples in Midtown Manhattan. It's on 47th Street and I don't know its name and it is run by a couple of argumentative Orthodox Jews, an African American man who seems to be the one who keeps the place running, and a near-deaf old woman probably the mother of one or both of the argumentative bosses. They keep the place a dreadful mess and the farther back into the store you go, the less you feel like you're in a store but more like you're in an egregiously disorganized back room filled with cardboard and old sandwiches. They write orders out on paper--carbon copy provided. They have a guy who "runs things over to Morrie" or whomever. Their pen collection is tired and dusty. They have odd things on the shelves, like white-out tape, that it seems no one has asked for since the mid nineteen-eighties.
And yet, and yet: they seem to maintain a thriving business. People are always coming in for reams of paper and paper clips and weird pen refills that are no longer manufactured. If you want something, you ask for it (like the old days) and they shuffle back into the dim recesses of the store, or they shove around some boxes under the counter and they get it for you. None of this "self-service" stuff at this place. They sell some up-to-date stuff too--lots of Moleskine notebooks. You can pick these out yourself. But most important, they have outlasted the local Staples.
In a previous post I had made note of how moms and pops fail in the face of the big boxes because they often have a poor attitude and don't seem happy to help. These guys have a swagger, but it's pride of place, and of the certain knowledge that whatever it is you want, they have it somewhere in that unholy mess and will excavate it for you and you will buy it. I've never bothered to compare their prices but I don't think they are the cheapest place in town.
There used to be so many shops like this in New York. Maybe everywhere. This one is hanging in there. I give them business whenever I can, even if the boxes are dented and the pens have to be wiped off before using them.
Staples closed up about a month ago.
--Renaissance
Thursday, July 16, 2009
But a stationery store, while usually stationary, is spelled with an "e", and in a world of Staples and Office World and of course Wal Mart, the stationery store often goes the way of the passenger pigeon.
I do, however, know of one that has managed to outlast the local Staples in Midtown Manhattan. It's on 47th Street and I don't know its name and it is run by a couple of argumentative Orthodox Jews, an African American man who seems to be the one who keeps the place running, and a near-deaf old woman probably the mother of one or both of the argumentative bosses. They keep the place a dreadful mess and the farther back into the store you go, the less you feel like you're in a store but more like you're in an egregiously disorganized back room filled with cardboard and old sandwiches. They write orders out on paper--carbon copy provided. They have a guy who "runs things over to Morrie" or whomever. Their pen collection is tired and dusty. They have odd things on the shelves, like white-out tape, that it seems no one has asked for since the mid nineteen-eighties.
And yet, and yet: they seem to maintain a thriving business. People are always coming in for reams of paper and paper clips and weird pen refills that are no longer manufactured. If you want something, you ask for it (like the old days) and they shuffle back into the dim recesses of the store, or they shove around some boxes under the counter and they get it for you. None of this "self-service" stuff at this place. They sell some up-to-date stuff too--lots of Moleskine notebooks. You can pick these out yourself. But most important, they have outlasted the local Staples.
In a previous post I had made note of how moms and pops fail in the face of the big boxes because they often have a poor attitude and don't seem happy to help. These guys have a swagger, but it's pride of place, and of the certain knowledge that whatever it is you want, they have it somewhere in that unholy mess and will excavate it for you and you will buy it. I've never bothered to compare their prices but I don't think they are the cheapest place in town.
There used to be so many shops like this in New York. Maybe everywhere. This one is hanging in there. I give them business whenever I can, even if the boxes are dented and the pens have to be wiped off before using them.
Staples closed up about a month ago.
--Renaissance
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Another Crank Complaint About a Common American Pastime
This time it's the ubiquitous practice known as "running"; and perhaps more in general, "exercise".
Like the moon-shots, this American obsession with fitness began with that well-known gymnast (at least between the sheets), JFK--who was, as the cognoscenti know, usually in severe pain due to this back, and on a frightening amount of drugs that helped him overcome a debilitating case of Addison's disease, and who was often too sick to get out of bed for weeks at a time. Perhaps it was this personal dichotomy--his severe illness coupled with his at-the-time successful projection of a youthful vitality--that drove him to promote personal vigor and especially exercise as almost a patriotic duty.
What I am almost certain will make my post seem especially perverse is the raw numbers of the obviously unfit in our nation, the one-hundred million-man/woman Army of obesity thundering around our big-box stores (or gliding in self-propelled I'm-too-fat-to-walk buggies).
I am not talking about them. They are, for the most part, beyond the help that even moderate exercise might bring. What they really need to do is just stop stuffing their pie-holes. But that is another post.
I am talking about the so-called "fit" and also the hopefully fit. Let me be clear: I hate running and other forms of exercise. I dislike them because they seem so pointless. Where am I running from/to? Why all the huffing and puffing (I have thought while on an exercise bike--an occurrence I admit is rare as a butterfly at Christmas). I seem to have no purpose other than a purely selfish one: make me thinner (for the record, the writer is somewhat overweight but not, I like to believe, anything like nearly obese).
So here is my complaint and it's more or less one of morals, or of social responsibility at least: if all of the runners and spinners and lifters have so much energy to burn, how about doing something constructive? There are lots of meals to be lifted to the hungry; plots to be dug on weekends for affordable housing; assistance needed for the straw-limbed who really cannot walk; children to be carried at hospices. You get the idea.
Or how about a proposal that would seem to satisfy so many if it could be implemented: why not pass a law (in NYC for example) that all exercise machines, especially those that don't pull electricity, must be hooked up to the electrical grid in order to generate energy. What if a runner could (voluntarily) strap on a belt that would transform the running motion into energy stored in a battery that could then be used at home to recharge cameras, ipods, robot vacuum cleaners and so much more?
Maybe then I would feel that all this running and spinning and in-place-jogging-while-watching-CNBC-while-listening-to the Black Eyed Peas weren't anything more than a madness born of self-absorption, vanity and a nitwit hunger to waste one's energetic years in pointless, repetitive motion.
--Renaissance
Monday, July 13, 2009
Like the moon-shots, this American obsession with fitness began with that well-known gymnast (at least between the sheets), JFK--who was, as the cognoscenti know, usually in severe pain due to this back, and on a frightening amount of drugs that helped him overcome a debilitating case of Addison's disease, and who was often too sick to get out of bed for weeks at a time. Perhaps it was this personal dichotomy--his severe illness coupled with his at-the-time successful projection of a youthful vitality--that drove him to promote personal vigor and especially exercise as almost a patriotic duty.
What I am almost certain will make my post seem especially perverse is the raw numbers of the obviously unfit in our nation, the one-hundred million-man/woman Army of obesity thundering around our big-box stores (or gliding in self-propelled I'm-too-fat-to-walk buggies).
I am not talking about them. They are, for the most part, beyond the help that even moderate exercise might bring. What they really need to do is just stop stuffing their pie-holes. But that is another post.
I am talking about the so-called "fit" and also the hopefully fit. Let me be clear: I hate running and other forms of exercise. I dislike them because they seem so pointless. Where am I running from/to? Why all the huffing and puffing (I have thought while on an exercise bike--an occurrence I admit is rare as a butterfly at Christmas). I seem to have no purpose other than a purely selfish one: make me thinner (for the record, the writer is somewhat overweight but not, I like to believe, anything like nearly obese).
So here is my complaint and it's more or less one of morals, or of social responsibility at least: if all of the runners and spinners and lifters have so much energy to burn, how about doing something constructive? There are lots of meals to be lifted to the hungry; plots to be dug on weekends for affordable housing; assistance needed for the straw-limbed who really cannot walk; children to be carried at hospices. You get the idea.
Or how about a proposal that would seem to satisfy so many if it could be implemented: why not pass a law (in NYC for example) that all exercise machines, especially those that don't pull electricity, must be hooked up to the electrical grid in order to generate energy. What if a runner could (voluntarily) strap on a belt that would transform the running motion into energy stored in a battery that could then be used at home to recharge cameras, ipods, robot vacuum cleaners and so much more?
Maybe then I would feel that all this running and spinning and in-place-jogging-while-watching-CNBC-while-listening-to the Black Eyed Peas weren't anything more than a madness born of self-absorption, vanity and a nitwit hunger to waste one's energetic years in pointless, repetitive motion.
--Renaissance
Monday, July 13, 2009
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