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Friday, September 21, 2001
STUDIO STORIES
I went straight from work on Tuesday night straight to the recording studio to lay down tracks for the first musical I was ever in, Peter Dizozza's Prepare To Meet Your Maker. We share an apartment now, but at the time I had been in New York all of six weeks, living in a huge expensive apartment in Brooklyn, I knew no one, and I was working a day job and a night job, shoehorning open mic appearances in between the odd couple-hours of sleep. I had never acted before, but Peter asked me, and in my new-emigrant hubris I took the gig, before I realized it was the lead role and I had a nude scene. (I wore boxers, but the buggery part stayed in the script, about which I'm still a little traumatized). The play ran one successful month at Baby Jupiter, and then the momentum of the project kind of fizzled out. But I made a lot of friends in the cast, and seeing them on Tuesday again after (in some cases) months of disappearance was really sweet.  It's basically a romantic comedy. I played Quasimodo, a hunchbacked necrophiliac gravedigger. Quasi digs up graves and makes a little whoopie with the corpses, but one night he picks a magical cadaver named Cementeria, who through coitus comes to life! And Quasimodo turns from this scummy necrophile into a quite distinguished man! Of course, the effect doesn't last long. We have to keep getting our proverbial freak on, or else Cemmy dies and Quasi gets all beastly again. So of course we get separated, and we chase each other across the world and through various mythological comic setups.It's probably more complicated than that, (here's someone else's stab at the plot, with illustrations from before I joined the cast) but that's all my little brain can handle. I know my motivations, so really, what the hell else do I care? And the songs are lovely, even if I'm singing most of them. The last time we ran the show was at the Sidewalk Cafe, which is a dreary and totally inappropriate place to stage a play. The stage was so small, we changed the thing into a reading. It really took the wind out of everyone's sails, and after that we all kind of went on our way. But I really missed the feeling of hanging out with that cast. The other nice been-a-long-timey thing about Tuesday was that I was back in a professional-type recording studio. It was in (actually, it was) this fellow's sixth-floor one bedroom apartment in Forest Hills, Queens. The living room had become a control room, the vocal booth was formed by closing a closet door and the bathroom door, and the only soundproofing I could see was thick shag carpeting nailed to every surface. I pity the guy's neighbors. The equipment was professional, and the end result sounded fine. But I couldn't help thinking, dude, you spent all this money and time on equipment, splurge and get yourself a real space.
Thursday, September 20, 2001
MY CORNER STORE
I find I've been going out of my way to shop at Arab and Asian-owned businesses this last week. I figure there's been so much talk, even among people who should really know better (which I guess is everyone) that we shouldn't be giving money to Those People, that I figure some of them are losing business, and so I'll put a little extra effort in to giving them what little business I can provide. Trust me, it's meager, but it's something else I can do. Around the corner from my house is the Little Pakistan Deli, which amidst its various signs in Arabic is flying as big an American flag as there is covering every square inch of the rest of the city these days (and I'm guessing the country too, though I haven't left Manhattan for more than a couple of hours since the attacks). It's yer standard East Village deli, open 24 hours, near both the NYU campus and a hospital, and even though it's fairly small it's always had people milling around in it, day and night, weekday and weekend, until this week. I go past that place every day on my way to and from work, and it's been a ghost town in there. What does one say or do when you see this happening? I find I've made a point of getting whatever I need, like TP, ramen, candy bars, "Kill The Taxman" voodoo candles, Froot Loops, cigars, saucy teen magazines, you know, the staples of modern life (I'm kidding - I hate Froot Loops and I can't remember the last candy bar I had, but -- look, I'm trying to make a point here) from there. Partly because I bet they're tenser than many others with their national allegiance dangling out there like some big bullseye for the abuse I'm sure they're getting, and partly because, like Jonathan Richman, I just like the character of a decent corner store, and the thought of this one closing makes me sad, and I've had enough sad for this month already, thanks. I'm not making extra trips there for no reason, and I'm not leaving twenties on the counter or anything. Just picking up the slack where some ignorant redneck student who doesn't know any better has decided to take out his rage by boycotting one of his neighbors.
LETTERMAN AND THE CHILDREN
Here's the text of David Letterman's amazing opening monologue on Monday night. Not that David Letterman is (or should be) the barometer of modern American thought or anything, but I was genuinely impressed with his candor, and, well, I long suspected he did many of the things he does on the show for purely personal and therapeutic reasons, and here we have stark, lovely, utterly human proof of it. (You can hear it in Realaudio if you missed it.) Remember the often-played footage of those Palestinian kids 'celebrating' the attacks? Well, these pictures of Palestinians in mourning show what I hope and guess is a slightly more prevalent viewpoint. (You know, if we held vigils every time a Palestinian town got bombed, let alone literally any other individual people in the Middle East or South Asia or anywhere else in the Third World, we'd never get to have a Union Square without candles again.)
Monday, September 17, 2001
NEWS FLASH: WAR IS STILL STUPID
I write too much about this stuff (I write too much in general - more than anything else in this life I need a good editor - you know one?), but does anyone really believe that Afghanistan or Osama bin Laden or whoever poses a real threat to the U.S.? Sure, we should get him and his posse or whoever else was involved, find them, try them, yeah, rock on, but please, don't give me this We're At War crap. This is not war. It's a worldwide manhunt for a criminal, a murderer with the blood of thousands on his hands. But that's it. This ain't even Iraq bombing Kuwait, let alone Pearl Harbor. Here's my meme. Say it with me now. The United States has not been attacked by a People. It's been attacked by a Person. And despite all the (manufactured?) evidence to the contrary, it's still possible that this person, whoever they are, had financial or logistical help from people who (*treason alert here*) might not have even had brown skin, who believed in a different god (like the Christian one, or the money one, or the power one), may have had other interests, other motives that the news outlets have jumped right over in their quest for a clean, simple story. This is the worst possible time to get ignorant.
LIFE DURING WARTIME
How did I get soup on the crotch of my pants when I ate it standing up over a counter, and I haven't grabbed myself in over ten minutes?
AFTERMATH
So like airbody else I've been watching CNN and CBC and BBC, and reading mainstream papers and some 'alternate' news sources, and the more I read, the more something's fishy. No, I'm not talking about W.'s disconnected blatherings about eradicating all evil and ending terrorism as we know it. (If terrorism was really eradicated, U.S. foreign policy as it currently is would become largely irrelevant. They'd have to start doing something more constructive, like feeding the poor or negotiating lasting peace treaties or something. And if George really believes what he's saying, and it sure looks like he does, I'm more scared than ever.) And I'm not talking about Dick Cheney's disappearance for those crucial first four days (I'd buy that he either was made to disappear so that George would have no competition for the spotlight of absolute control, at least until Giuliani stepped up and started acting all mayorlike, or maybe he was cowered under a desk scared shitless.) Nor am I talking about the jingoistic one-voice treason-baiting whipemup that's passing for news on the networks. But a rental car with an Arabic-language flight manual at the airport, as if flying a 767 is the kind of thing you can cram for, like a biology test? A passport of one of the suspects 'found' in the rubble? I thought the plane was the bomb, and if that fire was hot enough on those floors to actually melt the entire building, then how did a passport survive without a body? A stewardess' hands tied together, minus the rest of her? How'd they know it was a stewardess? And with all the gruesome photography we've already seen, why not show us this stuff? I have no proof of these things. But I have been lied to before. My guess is that the U.S. Government took a bad situation and is trying, clumsily in places, to turn it to their advantage. I believe they have plenty of ready-made 'pieces of evidence' to plant in whatever locations are necessary, either to help sway public opinion or to get convictions out of shaky courts or whatever. I also believe that if there's a couple of things that look fishy, there may be other happenings and items that have escaped scrutiny. (Ten bucks says Bush's 86% approval rating is cooked, and oh yeah, despite the magnitude of the crime committed last week, and despite what Congress and the Post might be yelling, repeat it after me: this is not war. War will begin when we bomb the crap out of Afghanistan and occupy it for a few months starting around Thanksgiving, and then they fight back in their feeble way. Last week was just the biggest crime ever committed, and yes, there is a difference.) I've seen enough, I think, that now I'm questioning everything I see or hear, including the cel phone calls from the planes, the directions airport security is now taking, the fact that the Osama bin Laden has been given a full week's head start (and counting) as if this was some big ole game of hide and seek, there are tons of lines to be read between. Look, I'm not saying things didn't go down exactly as we've been told. (Okay, maybe I am.) But I am aware of how history is being rewritten right before our eyes, by everyone with an agenda, and I'm trying (along with lots of others, I'm pleased to report) to keep track of everyone's story. And in the coming weeks, the people and companies who get filthy stinking rich off all this war talk are going to have to bear up under ever more scrutiny for their role in this catastrophe. Here's what I'm reading this week: The Usual Suspects: CNN / NYT / Reuters / BBC and then there's (in no order whatsoever, and far from complete, but still) Red Rock Eater Digest Ethel Follow Me Here Tom Paine Progressive Review Unnkown News and not least Metafilter, which has broken more stories than all the major networks combined this last week.
Sunday, September 16, 2001
I'M AWARE I'M JUST SEEING IT EVERYWHERE NOW
Odd things in the July 9, 2001 issue of the New Yorker (Living with someone who doesn't throw things out has its advantages): - a cartoon showing a rooftop party with the host coming out with a tray, the caption being:I am, in fact, aware that this is merely coincidence. Maybe it's just that the economy, oil prices, fear of the unknown and the hijinks of our past and current leaders are our main obsessions, which might be why this whole thing is hurting everyone like it has been. Maybe it's just that New York is in a lot of ways the most jaded, blase, detached city-state I've ever heard of, and this spectacular bursting of the bubble could not have been calculated to screw this city up any more than it could have. I guess this means I'm officially still paranoid.
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