Social Diary 11/30/04 - Lake Placid Horse Show and Richard Feldman

click here, really....

i always like to visit the pages of the new york social diary for a dose of fashion, taste, and what i surmise is the inverse of poverty. the picture that leads here kind of reminds me of a charlie white photograph, so that means creepy. what never fails to surprise me is how people you never expect [in this case, the boss] end up at places you'd never expect [in this case, a horse show in the adirondacks. with people like the mayor. and paula zahn.]

weird.

file under lucky

the people we know rarely know how lucky we feel. this could apply to anyone reading this, but tonight is someone in particular. it's like a game without prizes. and at the end, a pony...

Sorry Everybody

Sorry Everybody sometimes it's too much to keep up with, this world of ours. interesting response above to how november panned out.

jen's far away but not gone

thank god. writing back and forth with her tonight about how people can drift, how distance takes more forms than we can know....

jen knocks me over w/ this simple phrase: "the brutality of miles."

indeed. smart girl, that mahar.

our poet laureate

is Ted Kooser. The NYT has a little bit about him at the link above, and a search turned up this short, rather beautiful poem:

IN THE HALL OF BONES

Here we store the reassembled
scaffolding, the split, bleached uprights,
the knobby corner locks and braces
that held up the mastodon’s
bag of wet leaves and the ivory
forklift of its head. Over there are
the planks upon which lay the turtle’s
diving bell, and the articulated
rack that kept the dromedary’s hump
from collapsing under the weight
of its perseverance. And here is
the basket that held the clip-clop
pulse of the miniature horse
as it dreamed of growing tall enough
to have lunch from a tree. And then
here’s man, all matchsticks, wooden spoons
and tongue depressors wired together,
a rack supporting a leaky jug
of lust and worry. Of all the skeletons
assembled here, this is the only one
in which once throbbed a heart
made sad by brooding on its shadow.

New York Daily News - Home - Ugly sign misses the mark in subway

and while both the writers and readers of the daily news make me question the general intelligence of the general population, i do enjoy a good quote or two from a random idiot. witness below. someone hacked their way into one of the mta's mostly useless signs, all jenny holzer-like, informing us all that "PRETTY GIRLS DON'T RIDE THE SUBWAY". ha. funny. good.

maybe getting interviewed by a reporter makes you automatically sound stupid, but something tells me these people couldn't hold a conversation with a sandwich.

The boards usually flash public service messages reminding parents to hold their tykes' hands on escalators and to fold up strollers.

Some riders at the busy hub that serves seven lines took offense, while others laughed it off.

"It's a vicious lie," said Rachel Russell, 37, an East Village arts-program coordinator, mostly in jest. "I think someone is trying to be clever."

Lucia Morales, 31, a social worker from East New York, Brooklyn, was waiting for a downtown A train to take her home from celebrating a promotion.

"That's horrible," she said of the sign. "I'm pretty, and I take the subway every day."

Nick Bello, 57, a technical representative from Brooklyn, said he has seen proof that the message is wrong. "It's very strange," he said. "I see a lot of pretty girls on the subway."

Actress Katharyn Bond, 33, of the upper West Side, who was wearing a little black dress with heels and a pink shawl, was taking the subway to a theater to see a play. "Pretty women," she said, "take the subway so we can go spend money on more important things - like alcohol."

something tells me lucia's lying, katharyn would be fun to hang out with, and the person who did this should do it more often.

also, what's a tyke?

I'm sure they think the same about us.

Fuck the South:

with thanks to john...click the link above for the whole thing.

"Fuck the South. Fuck 'em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they'd stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves - yeah, those are states we want to keep. "

money well spent

what does $10.81 buy you in new york? lots of things, probably, most of which you probably don't want. last night, though, i was reminded that it can buy you about 10 pounds of food -- good food, incredibly hearty food -- at mama's over on avenue b. wow. coldest of the year, yesterday, so i drag a friend there for dinner and a big 'fuck you' to old man winter...salmon, mashed potatoes, asparagus. though i lapsed into immediate food coma, it was well worth it. tim: 1 , this season: 0.

it’s something in the air that makes people tag buildings or want to start fights with republicans or vote for the first time and feel shafted when it doesn’t work out. some even start e-mailing unsolicited opinions about the current state of affiars to your son, ex-colleagues, siblings and high school friends. dad did that last thing tonight.

i come home to find an e-mail from my father, to me and the abovementioned people. i'm struck, as i repeatedly have been lately, by these almost random - but completely explainable - bursts of confusion and frustration tinged with sarcasm that people have shown since the election.

here’s a bit:

Hello all-
Politically speaking, I feel like a stranger in my own land. I haven't been this disturbed by an election since 1972 !

I guess I'll have to get myself back to a fundamentalist Sunday school in Texas to learn the "correct" moral values ( the ones they are talking about in exit polls.) All along I've been worrying about things like the right to affordable healthcare, scientific research that will benefit mankind, educational parity, poverty, housing, wealth distribution and
"just/unjust" wars. I thought those were moral values. I still haven't let go of the old operating principle called " a Christian Imperative" that I grew up with. Silly me. I feel so ignorant ! Maybe I should ask George W. to recommend some books on morals and ethics that he found especially helpful.

my father is an infrequently sarcastic person, and in a way, this is his www.fuckthesouth.com. i think we all have our own version of that these days, and his strikes me both for its apparent evolution in thinking and the degree to which we seem to inhabit the same intellectual world.

i never really doubted either of those things, but at a time when every one of us who thinks remotely the same way and shares the same sense that the words and actions of those who would lead us for the next four years are so fundamentally at odds with what honest faith and morality demand, it’s good to know that dad and i are for the moment on the same page. and that the milkman was just that. a milkman.

holy shit, that’s the beer talking. we never had a milkman.

i can imagine not relating to your parents but thank god they were blue staters...

oh, and i was right about ashcroft. now bring on that gonzales fucker...

separated at birth?

Evil Christian Soldier Ralph Reed bears a striking resemblence to comedian/entertainer Murray Hill.

Which is strange, because Mr. Hill's a drag king and thus a woman, and Ralphie, though a man, could probably never grow a trash stash even w/ the lord's help.

There's some religious tide rising these days, friends and coworkers seem to agree, and frankly it has me a bit scared. Just when you think Reed and his ilk have gone away, we lose an election, there's some gays to keep unmarried, an ailing supreme court justice, and a president who believes god's got him on speed dial.

This will be the high water mark of my sociopolitical ramblings for the next for years, I'm afraid.

the centre cannot hold...

Jeanette Winterson's a fantastic writer, as I've said here before. Since I write on my own little site, seems to have done the same. I am not fit to sharpen this woman's pencils, but I like to think it's a sign that I know what's good that I know she is. A bit on www.jeanettewinterson.com about the state of things in this country, and thus the world these days, and she posts their a poem by Yeats.

Whether Bush is the thing slouching or the anarchy is ours today is beyond the point, I guess. You can read it and let if inform the state of things today, or let our current mess give a bit more meaning to the poem. Either way, things certainly do seem to fall apart...

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.
What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Strange to think that the second coming would probably make much of this country very happy...blood-dimmed tide and all.

stuck in my head

i find it here, quoted. that it shows up in an interview with one of my favorite poets, is strange. that it is an interview nearly 10 years old and they are talking about the state of the world [bad / yugoslavia / poverty / defunding the arts] makes me realize how it's appropriate to think of both then and now.

D.H. Lawrence's 'Hymn to Priapus'

Grief, grief, I suppose and sufficient
Grief makes us free
To be faithless and faithful together
As we have to be


Grief may not quite be the right word these days, but then again it seems almost perfect.

silver lining?

ashcroft may be out on his singing senator, homophobic, backwards thinking, freedom curtailing ass. which would be lovely.

My office is pretty much grief-stricken about the election, and someone sent this around. It doesn’t pertain so much to what did or did not happen these past few days, but has a lot to say about why art and the people who make it matter, and should be counted among the most necessary of things in this world. Especially now. Because many also have short attention spans, I'm going to take the liberty of highlighting passages as I see fit. You can thank me later.

This is kind of long, but worth reading if you have the time and if you are a] twisted in knots by the events of the past few days b] an artist/writer/sentient person c] curious about what an eloquent president is capable of sounding like d] all of the above...most of the people I know are in one way or another choice d].

From John F. Kennedy's remarks for the dedication of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College (an excerpt), October 26, 1963:

This day devoted to the memory of Robert Frost offers an opportunity for reflection which is prized by politicians as well as by others, and even by poets, for Robert Frost was one of the granite figures of our time in America. He was supremely two things: an artist and an American. A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.

In America, our heroes have customarily run to men of large accomplishments. But today this college and country honors a man whose contribution was not to our size but to our spirit, not to our political beliefs but to our insight, not to our self-esteem, but to our self- comprehension. In honoring Robert Frost, we therefore can pay honor to the deepest sources of our national strength. That strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant. The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation's greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.

Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost. He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. "I have been" he wrote, "one acquainted with the night." And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair. At bottom, he held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it is hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.

The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover's quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored in his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet in retrospect, we see how the artist's fidelity has strengthened the fibre of our national life.

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society--in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having "nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope."

yep.

a friend of mine sums up the current zeitgeist - at least among people like us.

"i wish we were our own country," she writes.

indeed. it honestly feels like it sometimes.

well, then...

one person's election reaction. not sure that's the brightest of ideas. something tells me killing politicians is like getting a mogwai wet. Now if only we could get some sun...

1) Don't expose them to bright lights, they don't like it. Sunlight will kill them.

2) Don't get them wet or they'll multiply.

3) Don't feed them after midnight, or they'll turn into Gremlins!!

Watching Mogwai is such a chore!

dumbfounded seems to be the prevailing sentiment here at work today. sad.

is there a morning after pill for elections?

will anyone with dual citizenship [ireland / brazil / thailand / wherever ] who would be willing to marry me, please drop a line.

thanks.

downtown

sunday, and i'm sitting in battery park at the southernmost tip of
manhattan. the weather is georgous, and remarkably unlike october.
this weekend, jenny holzer's truisms are supposed to be flown back and
forth along the hudson, unfurling behind a number of small planes.
they are not here yet, but i am because this is the latest in along
list of things i've told myself i need to do in this city.

there's too much to ever do it all, but there's no excuse not to do
more than i have been. from the arches in the park here, i can see my
friend's apartment, high enough in the air that it's views to the east
make even new jersey look breathtaking at night. and there's the
statue of liberty, minding her own business, perhaps a bit sad, i
think, that people are no longer allowed to snake their way up her
arm. a circle line boat, impossibly packed with people takes off from
the pier to my right, and i'm reminded that doing that, uramong the
most touristy of new york things, should still be on the list i just
mentioned.

to the left of the ritz-carlton, i can even make out the building my
uncle lived in so many years ago, before suburbia, children, and a
place to park your acura made a move to new jersey somehow palatable.
in college when i stayed there with him, the first time, it was up to
the roof with him and cans of beer and a developing sense of awe at
the city at night that has never gone away. an amazing view from a
window becomes moreso when you're up just a bit higher and when the
sky opens up over you.

it's a different time now, of course -- almost silly to point out how
life's changed years later -- but there's something kind of sad about
the view of kids and bikes and jetskis and ellis isand get broken by a
coast guard cutter crossing your field of vision, a guy on the back
propped up against the biggest machine gun i've ever seen, on a boat
or elsewhere.

but that was just for a second or two, and in place of that, eight
sailboats. it's a better day for sailboats anyway.

i voted today

did you?

can thinking be non-worksafe?

communist daughter, one of neutral milk hotel's nicer songs, just came on my internet radio, and while it's a beautiful, mournful song, it seems somehow improper to have "semen stains the mountaintops" coming over the speakers at your desk.

Communist Daughter
Sweet communist
The communist daughter
Standing on the sea-weed water
Semen stains the mountain tops
With cocoa leaves along the border
Sweetness sings from every corner
Cars careening from the clouds
The bridges burst and twist around
And wanting something warm and moving
Bends towards herself the soothing
Proves that she must still exist
She moves herself about her fist
Sweet communist
The communist daughter
Standing on the sea-weed water
Semen stains the mountain tops

because music has its own voice.

it does, you know.

The Times Magazine's one woman condescension army

you know, deborah solomon.

everytime i read her questions to the author/politician/artist/designer/person more important than me i am beside myself with her ability to talk down to people. there's snarky funny and there's snarky, i'm a jerk. i'm pretty sure she's that kind of snarky.

the site above sits her down to interview herself, which i'm sure would be painful for both interviewer and interviewee in whatever bizzarro world that would take place in.

here's a sneak peak:

You're a moribund NYT journalist who can't even treat Pulitzer Prize winners with anything close to respect. Do you smile much?

Only if you tell me how brilliant I am at making your life a living hell in fifty words or less.

of sailboats and machine guns

sunday, and i'm sitting in battery park at the southernmost tip of manhattan. the weather is georgous, and remarkably unlike october. this weekend, jenny holzer's truisms are supposed to be flown back and forth along the hudson, unfurling behind a number of small planes. they are not here yet, but i am because this is the latest in along list of things i've told myself i need to do in this city.

there's too much to ever do it all, but there's no excuse not to do more than i have been. from the arches in the park here, i can see my friend's father's apartment, high enough in the air that it's views to the east make even new jersey look breathtaking at night. and there's the statue of liberty, minding her own business, perhaps a bit unhappy, i think, that people are no longer allowed to snake their way up her arm. a circle line boat, impossibly packed with people takes off from the pier to my right, and i'm reminded that doing that, among the most touristy of new york things, should still be on the list i just mentioned.

to the left of the ritz-carlton, i can even make out the building my uncle lived in so many years ago, before suburbia, children, and a place to park your acura made a move to new jersey somehow palatable. in college when i stayed there with him, the first time, it was up to the roof with him and cans of beer and a developing sense of awe at the city at night that has never gone away. an amazing view from a window becomes moreso when you're up just a bit higher and when the sky opens up over you.

it's a different time now, of course -- almost silly to point out how life's changed years later -- but there's something kind of sad about how the view of kids and bikes and jetskis and ellis isand gets broken by a coast guard cutter crossing your field of vision, a guy on the back propped up against the biggest machine gun i've ever seen, on a boat or elsewhere.

but that was just for a second or two, and in place of that, eight sailboats. it's a better day for sailboats anyway.