Doesn't seem a day over 95

Happy Birthday to the Subway -- link here to NYT article, slideshow, etc.

it's a century old today.

most important dates and anniversaries pass me by without much fanfare, and today was no different. no crazy delays or re-routings, no screaming fights between passengers, no unusually crazy characters -- a friend last night recounted that on her way home she was seated across from a man who took it upon himself to remove his fake teeth and begin cleaning them [with his tounge].

it was fitting though that i had one of my favorite train experiences to mark the day. there are lots of elementary schools down on the LES, and every so often, a field trip to i don't know where means that a few dozen loud, shrill children pile on to the f train at east broadway. "hold on to the pole! move to the middle!" urge the well-meaning but largely ignored teachers.

surely you're not serious. if they hold on to the poll, then when the train starts [or stops] at each station, they'd stay still and not go careening into sleepy commuters trying to read their new yorkers and drink their coffee.

the children become missiles -- screaming, giggling missiles -- and they are a pain in the ass until you realize how cool it must be to be on a train when you're that little, when you're still too young to know that you're about to crash into the fat russian man, who's shoved up against the hassidic lady, who's knocked the coffee cup held by the well-dressed, but brown shoed, ad sales guy, which nearly spills on the white coat of some other person i just made up.

you're jealous, because these little kids don't seem to care. they're on the closest thing to a roller coaster most of them have ever been on. and instead of being pissed, you're happy for them.

ABC News: Kerry: Bush Won't Own Up to Bad Decisions

bush said this?! from ap wire story: "Warming up for that task in his last stop Monday, in Davenport, Iowa, Bush ditched his single-focus, national security speech of earlier events in favor of a broader pitch praising the traditions of the Democratic Party, a theme he returned to on Tuesday.
In a television interview aired Tuesday, Bush said he didn't oppose civil unions for same-sex couples even though the Republican Party platform opposes them. However, he supports banning gay marriage through a constitutional amendment.
'I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do so,' Bush said on 'Good Morning America' on ABC. 'I view the definition of marriage different from legal arrangements that enable people to have rights.' "

i still don't think that will help him win massachusetts...so who's not for civil unions at this point? idiot.

their side doesn't even have a clinton.

quote from someone attending the kerry/clinton rally yesterday. something about our last good president makes people talk all funny...

"'I had quadruple surgery in 1989, I know what it's like what he's doing,' said Jim Mangine, 59, a telephone technician who took three hours off work to attend the lunchtime rally. 'He looks fantastic. I didn't think he was that handsome - he's a good-looking guy, and I'm a man. It'll definitely get people off the fence.'"

que? 80,000+ people were probably thinking about the same thing. i hope they all vote.

sometimes we're so awake

when you stay out too late on a friday, you are reminded of many things, among them that it is late, now early. but what you lose in terms of sleep is gained back hand over fist, through good friends, music, honest talk about the necessary difficulty of making your place in this world, and just a little bit of bacon.

susan, impossibly, got just a little bit older last night, and we’re lucky to have been there. later, you realize the only purpose diners ever had, and you silently thank the minds that contrived to create a 24-hour place to think through things with friends.

and night into morning lets the sun become noticed not as something that makes you squint, but as a light that sets subway cars and warehouse walls ablaze.

you walk toward all this, and when you can’t wait to get home to write about it, you know it’s all been real. every last bit of it.

Ann Coulter's Pie Assailants

Salute these national heroes! That shrill, ill-informed bitch had this coming, to be sure. Got all custarded up while giving a speech.

It's strange that they people who did it look a bit like john cusack and flea, however...

Esquire's sexiest woman named - Oct 17, 2004

What?!? Her?

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -- Angelina Jolie, who manages to mesmerize men -- and fight off robot invaders -- with just one eye in her latest movie, has been named the "sexiest woman alive" in the latest edition of Esquire magazine.

Jolie, featured as the alluring, courageous fighter pilot with an eye patch in "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," was the top pick of the magazine's editors and mostly male readers to grace the cover of Esquire's annual "Women We Love" issue.

I'm sorry, was Bea Arthur unable to say yes? Esquire confuses the hell out of me. Final confirmation that I am probably not their target demographic.

i came home tonight on this silly blog whatever it is to find someone who wrote what for the moment is the nicest thing ever, what with me trying to write again, and someone paying attention. thanks.

CNN.com - Study: One in 100 adults asexual - Oct 14, 2004

CNN.com - Study: One in 100 adults asexual - Oct 14, 2004

LONDON, England (CNN) -- About one percent of adults have absolutely no interest in sex, according to a new study, and that distinction is becoming one of pride among many asexuals.

The new study was conducted by Anthony Bogaert, a psychologist and human sexuality expert at Brock University in St. Catherines, Ontario.

It was published in the latest issue of The Journal of Sex Research and is the focus of a report in this Saturday's issue of New Scientist.

Bogaert's analysis looked at responses to another study in Britain, published in 1994. That study was based on interviews of 18,000 people about their sexual practices.

It offered respondent a list of options. One read: "I have never felt sexually attracted to anyone at all." One percent said they agreed with the statement.


This is interesting...I'm perfectly happy if that 1 in 100 is morrissey or something, but i wish it were Bill O'Reilly or lynn cheney...

those who write give advice to those who read

novelists on slate say who their voting for and why. from banks to tan to updike to oates. franzen's got it right about teresa. kinda. sorta.

Jonathan Franzen says:

Kerry, of course. He's the candidate whose defeat Osama Bin Laden (if he's alive) is praying for. I trust him not to pour additional gasoline on the fires that Bush has set overseas. Also, since he's a Democrat, I trust him to exercise a modicum of fiscal sanity and to show a little compassion for the unlucky. Also, his wife is hot hot hot. She'd be a first lady for the ages.

for those making lists.

i would like a bridge like this for christmas, please.

over the third rail over the ocean

the band low's song 'over the ocean' is running through my head and my speakers as i type this, drawn from a trip i took yesterday on the A train.

like most of low's songs, and a lot of good songs in general, to see it all spelled out in just a few repeated phrases, a few simple words, belies the power of the words and music together. i wrote the other day about how ‘constellation’ hits me like that, and much of what low's ever done gets me in the same way. parts and process accumulate. you're left with something more than you'd bargained for.

i only realize now how well the song fit:

---

‘over the ocean’

i'm over the ocean
i'm over the ocean
over the hills
over the dell
over the fireline
over the sand
over the land
over the empire
and if i belong, then i'll be longer than expected
and if i'm wrong, the mighty and strong will be rejected
i'm over the ocean
i'm over the ocean
i'm over the ocean

---

unless you’re going to the airport or to visit friends in fort greene, there’s really little reason i’ve found to take the A train past jay street. take it to rope or gideon’s and you’re off at clinton-washington. even jfk doesn’t begin to consitute the end of the line on the train i’d sometimes use to venture up to inwood. it’s not to say there’s nothing past fort greene, of course, and god knows there’s more than a little to be said for getting off at random subway stops to explore, but i’ve really become terribly provincial about the areas where i spend my time. it’s easy to do.

with that in mind, and because everytime you look at a map on the subway you can’t help but notice that the same train that touches the northernmost tip of manhattan also takes the narrowest of paths out to the beaches of the rockaways, i decided to do just that. i really did it for the water.

the trains to coney island are, for me at least, not so much trains to the water as they are trains to hot dogs and cheap beer and attractive people from brooklyn wearing beat up converse and ratty t-shirts, trying to remember not to get their ipods wet if they happen into the waves. not so with the A train. most of the ride is predictible enough, as the familiar stops just out of manhattan give way to neighborhoods you can’t quite see yourself living in -- until it’s too late and they become the next place you’d consider living but now can’t afford. people who look too much like you give way to a mix of familiar and not, a reminder that this city is more than beer gardens and pointy shoes and other music.

it’s an express train, and so a dozen or more stops you’ve never heard of flash by, stations with names of people and ideas hard to define -- we pass liberty avenue and i think how strange it must be to live on a street called that these days.

awhile longer and then it’s the always disorienting -- and unless you’re to some degree not alive, always exhilerating -- feeling of being one moment underground and the next climbing steadily into the light of the morning / noon / evening. maybe it changes if you do it all the time, i suppose, but it shouldn’t.

above, the streets and traffic and people and backyards now, clear to the airport, and on my way there’s part of the vast majority of the city you never see, so near your neighborhood and so not a part of it. the train snakes across intersections and between apartment houses, backyards littered with the same toys people have everywhere, the same junked cars i’d find on cinder blocks on drives through pennsylvania. few people are actually out, but i strain my neck to see a kid tearing around a corner on inline skates, trying not to hold on to the fence next to him, but knowing he has to.

we’re way out now, and those occasional other people out, a janitor emptying trash into a dumpster, a teenage girl walking wherever, actually look up and wave to the train. i’m reminded of how, as kids, we’d try to get truckers to honk their horns on the interstate -- thinking it was for us, unaware then that hours on the road probably made them look forward to that -- to the chance to make a kid’s day, to have someone not on a c.b. make contact. i wonder if it’s not the same for all involved in this situation, as the people below wave and, i’m half-certain, the engineer in the front does the same, happy to be noticed after hours and hours of a day spent largely underground.

we pass a school. the sunlight beginning to look the way it does when autumn sets in, it sets the bricks of the schoolyard a kind of red and orange i can try to describe but you can only really know or not know. ribbons are tied in the chainlink fence that surrounds the basketball and kickball courts. what it spells out, in words that must be 30 feet long and in letters as tall as the kids who helped put them up is this: “VICTORY OVER VIOLENCE.”

it’s beautiful, and i curse myself again for not having a camera on me. always have a camera.

the train has nearly emptied out, and we reach the stop for the airport. an ocean of empty parking lots, nearly full parking lots, full parking lots, people’s cars exchanged for departures or awaiting return flights home. i knew this would be the last stop before the reason for my trip out here materialized, and it more or less was.

monday was declared a day off at my new job, and this trip declared an opportunity to clear a mind - mine - i found very clouded lately. the sun was brilliant all day; the sky clear, but with enough clouds to remind you it was, after all, sky. i got on the train partly for this, to see the sky open up as the skyline of manhattan receeded the way only manhattan’s has any business doing, both more striking and more sad the further you get from it. it was the water i really wanted to see, though.

i’m nearly five years in this city, and at least two have been spent bemoaning the fact that i’d never taken the train all the way out. here’s why: you look at the map and you see that shorly after the airport station the A train cuts across the water, more or less on its own, for what i thought would be, and what feels like the first time, forever. JFK is on your right, and if you are me, you look out to see a jet - enormous, weightless, and close - climbing toward, then over, what is now a completely empty train car, itself streaking across the water.

it’s surreal, to be in this thing with so many wheels and tons, so much association with the dirt and dark of the city, now coasting above the ocean, which now fills the view from every window, the sunlight streaming in, glinting off the ocean below.

well, maybe it's the bay, but that doesn't really matter. it was exactly how i’d hoped it would seem, exactly what i needed.

over the third rail over the ocean

the band low's song 'over the ocean' is running through my head and my speakers as i type this, drawn from a trip i took yesterday on the A train.

like most of low's songs, and a lot of good songs in general, to see it all spelled out in just a few repeated phrases, a few simple words, belies the power of the words and music together. i wrote the other day about how ‘constellation’ hits me like that, and much of what low's ever done gets me in the same way. parts and process accumulate. you're left with something more than you'd bargained for.

i only realize now how well the song fit:

---

‘over the ocean’

i'm over the ocean
i'm over the ocean
over the hills
over the dell
over the fireline
over the sand
over the land
over the empire
and if i belong, then i'll be longer than expected
and if i'm wrong, the mighty and strong will be rejected
i'm over the ocean
i'm over the ocean
i'm over the ocean

---

unless you’re going to the airport or to visit friends in fort greene, there’s really little reason i’ve found to take the A train past jay street. take it to rope or gideon’s and you’re off at clinton-washington. even jfk doesn’t begin to consitute the end of the line on the train i’d sometimes use to venture up to inwood. it’s not to say there’s nothing past fort greene, of course, and god knows there’s more than a little to be said for getting off at random subway stops to explore, but i’ve really become terribly provincial about the areas where i spend my time. it’s easy to do.

with that in mind, and because everytime you look at a map on the subway you can’t help but notice that the same train that touches the northernmost tip of manhattan also takes the narrowest of paths out to the beaches of the rockaways, i decided to do just that. i really did it for the water.

the trains to coney island are, for me at least, not so much trains to the water as they are trains to hot dogs and cheap beer and attractive people from brooklyn wearing beat up converse and ratty t-shirts, trying to remember not to get their ipods wet if they happen into the waves. not so with the A train. most of the ride is predictible enough, as the familiar stops just out of manhattan give way to neighborhoods you can’t quite see yourself living in -- until it’s too late and they become the next place you’d consider living but now can’t afford. people who look too much like you give way to a mix of familiar and not, a reminder that this city is more than beer gardens and pointy shoes and other music.

it’s an express train, and so a dozen or more stops you’ve never heard of flash by, stations with names of people and ideas hard to define -- we pass liberty avenue and i think how strange it must be to live on a street called that these days.

awhile longer and then it’s the always disorienting -- and unless you’re to some degree not alive, always exhilerating -- feeling of being one moment underground and the next climbing steadily into the light of the morning / noon / evening. maybe it changes if you do it all the time, i suppose, but it shouldn’t.

above, the streets and traffic and people and backyards now, clear to the airport, and on my way there’s part of the vast majority of the city you never see, so near your neighborhood and so not a part of it. the train snakes across intersections and between apartment houses, backyards littered with the same toys people have everywhere, the same junked cars i’d find on cinder blocks on drives through pennsylvania. few people are actually out, but i strain my neck to see a kid tearing around a corner on inline skates, trying not to hold on to the fence next to him, but knowing he has to.

we’re way out now, and those occasional other people out, a janitor emptying trash into a dumpster, a teenage girl walking wherever, actually look up and wave to the train. i’m reminded of how, as kids, we’d try to get truckers to honk their horns on the interstate -- thinking it was for us, unaware then that hours on the road probably made them look forward to that -- to the chance to make a kid’s day, to have someone not on a c.b. make contact. i wonder if it’s not the same for all involved in this situation, as the people below wave and, i’m half-certain, the engineer in the front does the same, happy to be noticed after hours and hours of a day spent largely underground.

we pass a school. the sunlight beginning to look the way it does when autumn sets in, it sets the bricks of the schoolyard a kind of red and orange i can try to describe but you can only really know or not know. ribbons are tied in the chainlink fence that surrounds the basketball and kickball courts. what it spells out, in words that must be 30 feet long and in letters as tall as the kids who helped put them up is this: “VICTORY OVER VIOLENCE.”

it’s beautiful, and i curse myself again for not having a camera on me. always have a camera.

the train has nearly emptied out, and we reach the stop for the airport. an ocean of empty parking lots, nearly full parking lots, full parking lots, people’s cars exchanged for departures or awaiting return flights home. i knew this would be the last stop before the reason for my trip out here materialized, and it more or less was.

monday was declared a day off at my new job, and this trip declared an opportunity to clear a mind - mine - i found very clouded lately. the sun was brilliant all day; the sky clear, but with enough clouds to remind you it was, after all, sky. i got on the train partly for this, to see the sky open up as the skyline of manhattan receeded the way only manhattan’s has any business doing, both more striking and more sad the further you get from it. it was the water i really wanted to see, though.

i’m nearly five years in this city, and at least two have been spent bemoaning the fact that i’d never taken the train all the way out. here’s why: you look at the map and you see that shorly after the airport station the A train cuts across the water, more or less on its own, for what i thought would be, and what feels like the first time, forever. JFK is on your left, and if you are me, you look out to see a jet - enormous, weightless, and close - climbing toward, then over, what is now a completely empty train car, itself streaking across the water.

it’s surreal, to be in this thing with so many wheels and tons, so much association with the dirt and dark of the city, now coasting above the ocean, which now fills the view from every window, the sunlight streaming in, glinting off the ocean below.

well, maybe it's the bay, but that doesn't really matter. it was exactly how i’d hoped it would seem, exactly what i needed.

i have never read "anna karenina" - there are times i'm convinced i haven't read anything - but a conversation last night made me think of the first line in tolstoy's book, which even i have memorized.

“All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

and he's right, of course, but has it completely reversed at the same time. funny how so many things work that way.

everyone has a song or twelve that gets them, for reasons both known and uncertain. it‘s a beat or an image, an urgency in the vocals, something you swear you’ve thought yourself before. explaining how it gets you is beside the point, really. but you hear it once and it’s a fixed point your life returns to each time thereafter.

everyone has a song like that, or should, and if they’re really lucky, it was made by people dear to them.

sit down if you click on this

sorry.

that was a take-off on newyorkish's bizarre google search of the day. they said schladerbotze.

i thought edelweisse. google it, and you get the sorry above. go read a book or something.

the condiment stays in the picture

high school friend is in town briefly today for ryan adams at the beacon, and the world - or at least tonight’s ticket holders - prays he does not fall again off the stage. we go briefly to the distinguished wakamba, a bar that distinguishes itself both by its name and the lack of underpants worn by the people who work there. a skirt is a skirt, but sometimes you should really wear boxers, too. coronas under palm trees and i know i need never move to puerto rico....

while waiting for the out of towners i wait under what two weeks ago would’ve been the bridge connecting penn station to the old post office building for the convention, a pathway for press and spin and bullshit. it’s gone now and, in its place, a friendly-looking vendor of pretzels and other hot food + poland spring. a man marches up, says ‘let me get a hot pretzel’ which i realize now years in this town is the tough guy’s way of being polite and asking for something. it has its formality, but it’s as though to say please would betray you as a fag or a liberal or a white collar wimpy wasp guy. so it’s 'lemme get' instead. [i forgot to employ the contraction before].

so that’s fine, many has been let to get his pretzel, and i drift away, looking for my friends...i see mr. pretzel 10 yards from the cart he bought it at, still applying mustard. strange, i think, that you would take away the quart of mustard with its crusty top and questionable hygiene. my new vendor friend agrees -- we make eye contact and nod that his mustard bottle has been jacked, and he goes after the guy, who’s not running and stealing, but simply putting mustard on under foot power. he’s stopped, and says ‘i’m not done,’ before realizing that mustard’s supposed to stay w/ the man who sold you the vehicle for the mustard in the first place.

knowing smiles exchanged with pretzle vendor upon his triumphant return, and i know that not only does this not happen elsewhere, but also that there’s no other place for me to be right now. only in new york, i think, before calling myself an asshole the way only someone who’s lived here awhile is entitled to.

urban innovation: mustard on those chains like bank pens. quality of life goes through the roof, guaranteed.

pointless felon sighting

i really thought soho would bring me an olson twin or something. instead i get martha stewart's stock boy, peter bacanovic. he looked very unimprisoned for the time-being.

a shame

Richard Avedon, Dead at 81

i just finished reading a profile of maurizio cattelan, which featured a typically compelling and photograph by avedon. he was even able to bring out something unexpected in teresa heinz kerry in a recent issue.

his site.

the truck that makes the world hate us has reason to be hated but us, too.

this is old news, and no one i know is in the market for this kind of tax break, but click here to see why buying a hummer makes sound financial sense.

With passage of the Jobs and Growth Act, Congress dramatically expanded the already generous SUV loophole by raising the deduction ceiling for certain purchases-including SUVs-from $25,000 to $100,000.7 Under this new rule, the entire cost of all but one large SUV-the Hummer H1-can be deducted. This act also increased the "bonus deduction" from 30% to 50%8, which businesses can utilize in the first year of purchase on the amount above the initial deduction. This bonus deduction was established in addition to the five-year depreciation schedule9, which remained the same.

Under the new plan, a business owner who purchases a $110,000 Hummer H1 in 2003 can now deduct a total of $106,000 in the first year.

that's 106,000 reasons to be pissed off at this administration. c'mon, i know you needed a few more.

the smirk network

Democratic National Committee to here and watch all the huffing and puffing and frustration of our manchild president from last night's debate. the dnc spliced it all together for your viewing pleasure. somebody looks he thinks the new kid's taking charge of his sandbox. oh well.

oh, a debate. about issues

gravitas vs. a petulant child in a kevlar vest: that was an interesting exchange last night. both did reasonably well and made thos who liked them already happy. as always, i'm still not sure about those undecided people, so i don't have much to say about who won. the times had a little summary of the debate, linked above, and all i'll do is end with kerry's assessment of bush. in the end, it's really this simple.

"It is too soon to know whether Mr. Kerry, trailing in pre-debate polls, accomplished what Mr. Bush did four years ago when he came out of his first debate against Al Gore stronger than when he went in (or what Ronald Reagan did when he leapfrogged ahead of Jimmy Carter). But he is hoping that voters will agree with his own succinct assessment of Mr. Bush last night: 'It's one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and be wrong.' "

amen.

well, i had it mostly right. here’s robert creeley’s poem, properly typed.

you

Back and forth across
time, lots of things
one needs one’s

hand held for. Don’t
stumble, in the dark. Keep
walking. This is life.

---
there. that’s better. he’s really very good.