Friday, January 15, 2010
If the Phone Dont Ring it's Me
please help us we cannot exist beyond your posts. Helpless , helpless help us. If the phone doesn't ring, it's the whole world beyond your office.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
The Phone
It sat where it always did, by the lamp in the corner of the TV-room/library. It was a new model, but I still wanted to trace that old pattern on it: 723-5288.
That was E's number, and coming into the house on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, it seemed wild with possibility. A re-connection with her and all my friends, especially in college and immediately thereafter. The phone was a portal that transported me away from Princeton and to the new and better life I had created in DC at the time.
I just called it. The number, said the mechanical voice on the phone, has been disconnected.
That could be the title of my memoirs of the hellish years that have passed like a rushing river since the early 1990s. I am a Dorian Gray that, instead of exploiting my static age, has been ravaged by it. I am starting to grow some gray in my now dark blond/light brown hair.
It should be shock white.
That was E's number, and coming into the house on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, it seemed wild with possibility. A re-connection with her and all my friends, especially in college and immediately thereafter. The phone was a portal that transported me away from Princeton and to the new and better life I had created in DC at the time.
I just called it. The number, said the mechanical voice on the phone, has been disconnected.
That could be the title of my memoirs of the hellish years that have passed like a rushing river since the early 1990s. I am a Dorian Gray that, instead of exploiting my static age, has been ravaged by it. I am starting to grow some gray in my now dark blond/light brown hair.
It should be shock white.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Julie Miller
An old ache re-appeared tonight, and despite the lack of outcome (no pun intended), it's good. There was a girl (definitely young) who looked almost like Julie Miller, whom I had a brief and bad affair with years ago. I looked at her and felt a long-dormant excitement in the loins.
Julie was not beautiful, but cute as hell in that New York Jewish girl way that drove a goy like me crazy. She had gone to Wisconsin with me, and was a self-described "little mouse" at the time. We met again sometime after graduation at a party near Columbia, and experienced a passionate cab-ride home.
We met again a week later, me at a cheap hotel downtown. She was living in Seattle, but was visiting her parents in town. We ended up at that hotel, and I ended up disappointing her. In subsequent communication, I did the male thing and hid in shame, though she seemed still interested.
I'm going to have to come to terms with the fact that the girls I was interested in years ago are long gone, and have become mature women. That is what the tapering off of the physical symptoms of anxiety will peal back, and hopefully I can adjust to them. Because I talked to the substitute Julie Miller, and you could see her whipping out the mental wheelchair for me in her eyes. Help me out, Rambler or whoever else reads this page. What's the new age limitations (both up and down)?
(Note to a certain dark-haired minx that sometimes reads this: you are hotter now than ever).
Julie was not beautiful, but cute as hell in that New York Jewish girl way that drove a goy like me crazy. She had gone to Wisconsin with me, and was a self-described "little mouse" at the time. We met again sometime after graduation at a party near Columbia, and experienced a passionate cab-ride home.
We met again a week later, me at a cheap hotel downtown. She was living in Seattle, but was visiting her parents in town. We ended up at that hotel, and I ended up disappointing her. In subsequent communication, I did the male thing and hid in shame, though she seemed still interested.
I'm going to have to come to terms with the fact that the girls I was interested in years ago are long gone, and have become mature women. That is what the tapering off of the physical symptoms of anxiety will peal back, and hopefully I can adjust to them. Because I talked to the substitute Julie Miller, and you could see her whipping out the mental wheelchair for me in her eyes. Help me out, Rambler or whoever else reads this page. What's the new age limitations (both up and down)?
(Note to a certain dark-haired minx that sometimes reads this: you are hotter now than ever).
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Bullets over Broadway
One of the great Rambler quotes of all time came when the city finally decided to make over Times Sq. He was opposed to it. Why? "Scum have to go somewhere."
Scum made an unwelcome return to the Square on Thursday, when a CD Peddler (read: hustler), was stopped by the NYPD for having no license to sell on the street. The peddler, a 25-year-old dirtbag, was duly seen in a photo with Al Sharpton (a bigger hustler cannot be humanly found)in the NY Post.
To sum up the story, the peddler ran through one of the walkways that take you from the Broadway streetside to a kind of cabbie-arcade entrance midblock at the Marriott Marquis hotel.
A plainclothes cop told the peddler to stop. Instead, the guy whips out a submachine gun that later turned out to have a magazine with 17 bullets in it. The guy gets off two shots, then the gun jammed. The cop then shot the man four times in the middle of Times Square tourists (at about noon) and killed him.
Should this story be read as an example of police over-reaction, it is anything but that. The CD peddlers in Times Square are shakedown artists, pure and simple. They play on the fears of tourists, whom New York needs more than ever right now.
Here's the two big hustles. 1) A guy comes up to you and says he's an up and coming rap artist, signs his name on a worthless CD, then he and his homies surround you. Close, real close, in those menacing extra-large puffy black Michelin tire man jackets. Then they demand $10 for the CD.
2) The friendly approach. The CD has all kinds of fake album-cover art and seems professional. A man says that this is your opportunity to catch a rising talent before anyone else. All this can be yours for the low, low price of $10. Catch him before Wal-Mart does.
The man, 25, was definitely in the first camp. His idiotic raps about killing cops were all over the tabloids yesterday. Hey, Rolling Stone (and Nate Brackett, one of my college editors), here's a moron you can hype as "real" and "from the street!"
The truth is that Times Square is always going to be under siege from the various discontented segments of NY society. Gangs used to go there for initiation wherin you as a prospective member go to mug someone and thus be brought into the gang.
The cops were everywhere in the Square last night, mostly to direct traffic, but also to keep order. Whatever you think of the sanitized new Times Square, the city knows a gold mine (in the form of tourists) when it sees it.
A little irony in this case. When the Marriott decided to put up the Marquis, the Square was still more than a little sketchy. It thus put up a kind of berm on the Broadway side of the building, with the entrance to the hotel mid-block or so. This was to protect tourists from marauding no-goodniks populating the street. You simply caught a cab inside the arcade and went.
These arcades or breezeways or whatever were exactly where the violence went down. Next time try razor wire.
Scum made an unwelcome return to the Square on Thursday, when a CD Peddler (read: hustler), was stopped by the NYPD for having no license to sell on the street. The peddler, a 25-year-old dirtbag, was duly seen in a photo with Al Sharpton (a bigger hustler cannot be humanly found)in the NY Post.
To sum up the story, the peddler ran through one of the walkways that take you from the Broadway streetside to a kind of cabbie-arcade entrance midblock at the Marriott Marquis hotel.
A plainclothes cop told the peddler to stop. Instead, the guy whips out a submachine gun that later turned out to have a magazine with 17 bullets in it. The guy gets off two shots, then the gun jammed. The cop then shot the man four times in the middle of Times Square tourists (at about noon) and killed him.
Should this story be read as an example of police over-reaction, it is anything but that. The CD peddlers in Times Square are shakedown artists, pure and simple. They play on the fears of tourists, whom New York needs more than ever right now.
Here's the two big hustles. 1) A guy comes up to you and says he's an up and coming rap artist, signs his name on a worthless CD, then he and his homies surround you. Close, real close, in those menacing extra-large puffy black Michelin tire man jackets. Then they demand $10 for the CD.
2) The friendly approach. The CD has all kinds of fake album-cover art and seems professional. A man says that this is your opportunity to catch a rising talent before anyone else. All this can be yours for the low, low price of $10. Catch him before Wal-Mart does.
The man, 25, was definitely in the first camp. His idiotic raps about killing cops were all over the tabloids yesterday. Hey, Rolling Stone (and Nate Brackett, one of my college editors), here's a moron you can hype as "real" and "from the street!"
The truth is that Times Square is always going to be under siege from the various discontented segments of NY society. Gangs used to go there for initiation wherin you as a prospective member go to mug someone and thus be brought into the gang.
The cops were everywhere in the Square last night, mostly to direct traffic, but also to keep order. Whatever you think of the sanitized new Times Square, the city knows a gold mine (in the form of tourists) when it sees it.
A little irony in this case. When the Marriott decided to put up the Marquis, the Square was still more than a little sketchy. It thus put up a kind of berm on the Broadway side of the building, with the entrance to the hotel mid-block or so. This was to protect tourists from marauding no-goodniks populating the street. You simply caught a cab inside the arcade and went.
These arcades or breezeways or whatever were exactly where the violence went down. Next time try razor wire.
Friday, November 27, 2009
The Closed City
There is no greenery, it is enough to make a stone sad - Nikita Kruschev, when visiting New York to attend the UN
She stands like a witch at the gateway to the continent - Not sure the source, about NY.
When I was a kid I read a book called "The Open City," which was about Washington. Essentially, it said that DC was remarkable in that you as an average citizen could enter into high government buildings, including the White House, basically for free.
If DC was the open city in the time before terrorism, New York has always been the closed one. To gain access to its monoliths, one usually needs a few things: money, some kind of card, a name that you are going to, an invitation to an apartment or event, a key or a key-card, or some kind of numerical code.
It is no coincidence that architects refer to Manhattan's "street wall." It is usually as closed off to you as the Mongols were by the Great Wall of China unless you have the proper qualifications.
Thus I always take any chance to penetrate the facade. This usually means parties, but can also mean receptions in places ordinarily off-limits to you. I still regret not going to see a speaker from Georgetown Prep at the Met Life Building a few years ago. Not because I wanted to see the speaker, but because it was in the businessmen's exclusive club at the top of the building that dominates the boulevard. I could have looked at the building from then on and said "I've been to the club on top" and would thus possess it rather than being forever an outsider.
This is also why I always took any excuse to go to the Ivy League clubs clustered in Midtown. I've been to the Penn Club (formerly the Yale Club), the Yale Club (the most impressive, across from Grand Central), and the Princeton club (a modern disappointment).
However, I still must penetrate the sanctum sanctorum of the Eastern Establishment, the Harvard Club, on 44th near Fifth.
This is no mean feat. There are two tailcoated doormen/goons at the door ready to escort you in, or out. It is a historic landmark/McKim, Mead, and White Georgian building, and imposing.
My father went to Harvard as a grad student, but most of the time you need a registered member to allow you passage. Most of my father's acquaintance members are now dead or inactive. Maybe there's a service entrance I could sneak in as a pastry chef.
The NYT ran a feature called "rooms" for awhile. It showed you the inside of these guarded fortresses of the elite. Still, the Metropolitan Club at 5th and 60th refused to allow them to photograph the dining room.
Park Avenue at one point was called "a democracy of millionaires." You cannot tell from the outside the tremendous wealth inside. Harder still is to get a glimpse of the penthouses and terraces usually set back on top.
Hunter College, through an accident of history, actually has one building on Park and 68th. There was one computer lab that was up high, which I used for spying on these hidden terraces with their desperate little gardens in the sky.
I guess the most impressive apartment I've seen is Leslie Stahl's duplex on top of a building that overlooks that strange little park that surrounds the Museum of Natural History (she's married to a rich guy). On the roof deck, if you looked sideways, you could see over Central Park to the east side.
But the best view I've ever gotten was from my Wisconsin roomates parent's rather small and drab place on Central Park West. The Eisenbergs. Ordinary upper-middle class New York Jews. How they got the place is one of those NY real estate mysteries that are better left untouched.
Rachel and I also got a chance to stay at a duplex on top of a building at 57th and Sixth. A rather small (12-14 stories) plain brick number situated on some of the highest-priced real estate in the world. It had a terrace, too, but was dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers.
The Times ran a story a few weeks ago about the great NY sport of trying to peer into your neighbors' interiors. The last time I did this, at the back of an ordinary upper east side apartment, I looked into a place that was paneled from top to bottom with Oak or Mahogany or some other expensive wood.
There are ten thousand rooms in the closed city, but I have yet to wrangle entrance to a Park or Fifth Ave duplex palace like in "Metropolitan." Maybe I'll do like that couple in the White House and just wander in. A beautiful woman would help. Contact me at Gatecrashers.com.
She stands like a witch at the gateway to the continent - Not sure the source, about NY.
When I was a kid I read a book called "The Open City," which was about Washington. Essentially, it said that DC was remarkable in that you as an average citizen could enter into high government buildings, including the White House, basically for free.
If DC was the open city in the time before terrorism, New York has always been the closed one. To gain access to its monoliths, one usually needs a few things: money, some kind of card, a name that you are going to, an invitation to an apartment or event, a key or a key-card, or some kind of numerical code.
It is no coincidence that architects refer to Manhattan's "street wall." It is usually as closed off to you as the Mongols were by the Great Wall of China unless you have the proper qualifications.
Thus I always take any chance to penetrate the facade. This usually means parties, but can also mean receptions in places ordinarily off-limits to you. I still regret not going to see a speaker from Georgetown Prep at the Met Life Building a few years ago. Not because I wanted to see the speaker, but because it was in the businessmen's exclusive club at the top of the building that dominates the boulevard. I could have looked at the building from then on and said "I've been to the club on top" and would thus possess it rather than being forever an outsider.
This is also why I always took any excuse to go to the Ivy League clubs clustered in Midtown. I've been to the Penn Club (formerly the Yale Club), the Yale Club (the most impressive, across from Grand Central), and the Princeton club (a modern disappointment).
However, I still must penetrate the sanctum sanctorum of the Eastern Establishment, the Harvard Club, on 44th near Fifth.
This is no mean feat. There are two tailcoated doormen/goons at the door ready to escort you in, or out. It is a historic landmark/McKim, Mead, and White Georgian building, and imposing.
My father went to Harvard as a grad student, but most of the time you need a registered member to allow you passage. Most of my father's acquaintance members are now dead or inactive. Maybe there's a service entrance I could sneak in as a pastry chef.
The NYT ran a feature called "rooms" for awhile. It showed you the inside of these guarded fortresses of the elite. Still, the Metropolitan Club at 5th and 60th refused to allow them to photograph the dining room.
Park Avenue at one point was called "a democracy of millionaires." You cannot tell from the outside the tremendous wealth inside. Harder still is to get a glimpse of the penthouses and terraces usually set back on top.
Hunter College, through an accident of history, actually has one building on Park and 68th. There was one computer lab that was up high, which I used for spying on these hidden terraces with their desperate little gardens in the sky.
I guess the most impressive apartment I've seen is Leslie Stahl's duplex on top of a building that overlooks that strange little park that surrounds the Museum of Natural History (she's married to a rich guy). On the roof deck, if you looked sideways, you could see over Central Park to the east side.
But the best view I've ever gotten was from my Wisconsin roomates parent's rather small and drab place on Central Park West. The Eisenbergs. Ordinary upper-middle class New York Jews. How they got the place is one of those NY real estate mysteries that are better left untouched.
Rachel and I also got a chance to stay at a duplex on top of a building at 57th and Sixth. A rather small (12-14 stories) plain brick number situated on some of the highest-priced real estate in the world. It had a terrace, too, but was dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers.
The Times ran a story a few weeks ago about the great NY sport of trying to peer into your neighbors' interiors. The last time I did this, at the back of an ordinary upper east side apartment, I looked into a place that was paneled from top to bottom with Oak or Mahogany or some other expensive wood.
There are ten thousand rooms in the closed city, but I have yet to wrangle entrance to a Park or Fifth Ave duplex palace like in "Metropolitan." Maybe I'll do like that couple in the White House and just wander in. A beautiful woman would help. Contact me at Gatecrashers.com.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
There's Pictures of Mirrors on the Wall
I may have misheard him, but I swear this lyric lies in the center of the intro to Bruce Springsteen's "Candy's Room."
I have a bone to pick with Springsteen detractors. This somehow encompasses most friends and hipster types. Springsteen has written in the American vernacular (Woody Guthrie, Bob Seeger, Bob Dylan) for years, yet has been denied hipster cred by the very honesty of his words.
He is a fake, I'm told, a multi-milliniare writing about working-class blues. To which I respond, at least he addresses the facts. Too many hipster types reject the Springer viscerally, thinking his music unprogressive and derivative and sentimental. Good. Tangential, musically abstruse groups like Pavement have their place, but are ultimately a product of their times. The Springer remains. And the emotions of what it means to be a young man in America, like "Badlands," will always need to be addressed.*
*Lights out tonight
trouble in the heartland
there's a head-on collision
smashing in my guts, man
I'm caught in a cross-fire
But I don't understand
I have a bone to pick with Springsteen detractors. This somehow encompasses most friends and hipster types. Springsteen has written in the American vernacular (Woody Guthrie, Bob Seeger, Bob Dylan) for years, yet has been denied hipster cred by the very honesty of his words.
He is a fake, I'm told, a multi-milliniare writing about working-class blues. To which I respond, at least he addresses the facts. Too many hipster types reject the Springer viscerally, thinking his music unprogressive and derivative and sentimental. Good. Tangential, musically abstruse groups like Pavement have their place, but are ultimately a product of their times. The Springer remains. And the emotions of what it means to be a young man in America, like "Badlands," will always need to be addressed.*
*Lights out tonight
trouble in the heartland
there's a head-on collision
smashing in my guts, man
I'm caught in a cross-fire
But I don't understand
Who Killed the Kennedys?
Why are the 1960s' still interesting? I know that when I was at Madison, I eventually couldn't stand the straw-men put up by the left to describe just how great they were compared to our slothful, indolent, and apathetic generation. I eventually wrote a column on it that was probably the best-received article I've ever written.
But the 1960s are still important in one singular way: they showed how a democratic society, once seriously threatened, supposedly acts like any other government regime: repression, police state actions, and quasi-fascist "spy" organizations that bloomed during times of real threat.
My ancient and wise father once said that he thought that 1968 was the one year he thought a revolution was possible in the US. This is understandable: the French revolution of 1968, actually bringing workers and students together, the campus and ghetto uprisings (or riots, depending on your view), and the challenges to America's military power abroad, especially the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which showed Americans Vietnamese guerrillas inside our embassy for a fight we said we were winning in Saigon.
But then there is the question of dissent. How much is possible without the government taking counter-action? In Madison, there were University police, the National Guard, the FBI, and various types of military intelligence on campus. Many supposedly "undercover" (one was denounced when it was found he had a wedding band on).
So is the US just like any other ultimately repressive state? Will it kill (like at Kent State) when it finds it necessary to preserve its stature? Are we a democratic state or a thinly disguised republic of lies?
The Chinese present a conundrum in this case: free-market capitalism within a quasi-Stalinist government. No one, it seems, will complain unless the spigot of international commerce is somehow turned off. The state as leader in a pro-capitalist state is difficult to reconcile to its objective of repressing any dissent.
The Kennedy I regret passing is not John, but his brother Robert, or Bobby. Here was a man that was equally attractive to both worker and student, black and white. In an election, he would have easily beat Nixon, who after all barely beat back party hack Hubert Humphrey.
So capitalism is not the great balm of repressive government as advertised. It can bloom without a sound. It is up to us to make some noise.
But the 1960s are still important in one singular way: they showed how a democratic society, once seriously threatened, supposedly acts like any other government regime: repression, police state actions, and quasi-fascist "spy" organizations that bloomed during times of real threat.
My ancient and wise father once said that he thought that 1968 was the one year he thought a revolution was possible in the US. This is understandable: the French revolution of 1968, actually bringing workers and students together, the campus and ghetto uprisings (or riots, depending on your view), and the challenges to America's military power abroad, especially the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which showed Americans Vietnamese guerrillas inside our embassy for a fight we said we were winning in Saigon.
But then there is the question of dissent. How much is possible without the government taking counter-action? In Madison, there were University police, the National Guard, the FBI, and various types of military intelligence on campus. Many supposedly "undercover" (one was denounced when it was found he had a wedding band on).
So is the US just like any other ultimately repressive state? Will it kill (like at Kent State) when it finds it necessary to preserve its stature? Are we a democratic state or a thinly disguised republic of lies?
The Chinese present a conundrum in this case: free-market capitalism within a quasi-Stalinist government. No one, it seems, will complain unless the spigot of international commerce is somehow turned off. The state as leader in a pro-capitalist state is difficult to reconcile to its objective of repressing any dissent.
The Kennedy I regret passing is not John, but his brother Robert, or Bobby. Here was a man that was equally attractive to both worker and student, black and white. In an election, he would have easily beat Nixon, who after all barely beat back party hack Hubert Humphrey.
So capitalism is not the great balm of repressive government as advertised. It can bloom without a sound. It is up to us to make some noise.
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