Blogorrhea Junior

Rainy Serendipity

Walked down to Union Square today after escaping from work, to visit the paper stores and look for stuff for Lizard's book, and ran into a treat. It's been raining all day but wasn't as I walked through Madison Square Park. The leaves are coming out in lacy green and the trees are blooming, and everything looks so much brighter against the dark, wet trunks. This is why I love rainy days so much. The colors are more intense and the contrast more vivid. By the time I got done wandering in and out of Restoration Hardware, Paper Access, Print Icon, and Ennju, it had started to rain again and was about 6 pm. I bypassed my habitual entrance at 16th street in the middle of the greenmarket just because I decided I wanted to be aboveground fora while yet. So I walked up to the gazebo entrance near 14th Street and on the way ran into the sound installation, Sonic Forest by Christopher Janney of 10 metal pillars about 4 feet high and 8 inches around, encasing an occasionally flashing blue light and speakers. At random intervals each pillar flashes and then plays either chimes or gongs or birdsong. They're arranged in an allée and people kept walking up to the pillars and tapping them. It was hard to tell whether that activated them, but apparently they're motion sensitive too:

People “play” the installation by passing among slender aluminum columns (containing audio speakers, lights and photo-electric sensors) triggering an ever-changing “score” of melodic tones, environmental sounds and spoken texts and light effects. The installation will also randomly trigger itself in specific patterns, as if “ghosts” were passing invisibly through the forest.

In sunlight, I suspect it might be a bit hokey, but in the grey rain it was lovely, though it doesn't quite rank up there with the installation in Madison Square Park a couple of summers ago that was nothing but a little gingko tree, a rough wooden bench, a lichen-encrusted boulder and an invisible snowmaker that left big drifts in the 90 degree weather. That was less artlike than artful, but it appealed to the magical realist in me. I'm sure it'll find its way into a story somewhere. The soundscape installation was just a pleasant diversion: charming but not magical.

Still, this is what I love about living here: running into pleasant surprises like this, the serendipity of the city. Friday, after I was on my way home from hanging out with Marcia at the two book exhibits at NYPL, and ran into Merry, who dragged me off to the Annie Liebowitz opening around the corner. The odds of us running into each other that far from work and from anything else in common to us (we ran into each other at 56th & Madison; we work at Park & 29th) are pretty astronomical, but there we were. And 45 minutes later, I ran into another friend from work who lives in Queens at the Pottery Barn on 59th, on my way to the 59th & Lex station. That's strangely magical too.

Memento Mori, Choose Life

There's more than one reason why April is one of my least favorite months. Taxes, for one. And that other only sure thing: Death. Twleve years ago on the 12th, my friend Nick Bucci died of AIDS here in New York City, another statistic in a rising tide of them. Twelve years is a long time in some ways, and it's easy to let that memory recede quietly, so it's only a little ache, a sad memory. By now, that's what I've done, unless it's brought home to me as it was this year, just today.

Nick's death, I've always thought, was particularly cruel, not just because he was so young, but because in a couple more years, the current cocktail of drugs might have saved him. He could be turning 40 this year instead of being missed. What fun that would have been. I always wonder what I missed by not getting to know Nick better. Lots of laughs, certainly.

The irony of losing him in spring, when everything is coming back to life, didn't escape me either. I will always remember that the trees were in bloom on St. Mark's Place the week he died. I can't see them now without some sense of poignancy.

So what prompted me to make this post this year, and remember that Nick died 12 years ago this month, was reading in the Times about the revival of Larry Kramer's play "The Normal Heart" at the Public Theater. This is a play about the very early days of AIDS when the pandemic was just beginning. If you're too young to remember how freaked we were then by this inexplicable and mysterious devouring disease, if the possibility of contracting AIDS just seems like an everyday hazard to you, like walking out into traffic in front of a taxi, maybe you need to see this play. The situation hasn't gotten much better. In many ways, it's worse.

In the last CDC report for World AIDS Day (December 1, 2003) HIV infection rates for the US alone were up for the fourth straight year, and that's only in 29 states not including California and New York. The worldwide statistics are even scarier:

According to estimates from the Joint United Nations programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO), 37 million adults and 2.5 million children were living with HIV at the end of 2003. This is more than 50% higher than the figures projected by WHO in 1991 on the basis of the data then available. During 2003, some 5 million people became infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS. The year also saw 3 million deaths from HIV/AIDS - a high global total, despite antiretroviral therapy, which reduced AIDS and AIDS, related deaths in the richer countries.

Nick's death changed me in ways I probably wish it hadn't, although it also made me a stronger person in some ways. If you think watching your parents get old and have health problems, or burying them, is hard, it can't compare with watching someone your own age struggle with this disease which is so many diseases in one, and lose that struggle. Burying people your own age is traumatic in a way that losing people who've had full lives will never be. So spare your friends and family the pain. If you don't know how to protect yourself, find out.

Live a while longer to pay your taxes.

The Root of All Evil

Marcia sent me this yesterday. I think it explains how people like Bush get elected, how major corporations manage to rape the environment, and so many other things. I'm not sure where she got it, but it's no doubt making its rounds on the 'net as you read it. It reminds me, in a strange way, of the post I read on F Train yesterday, probably because it speaks to my own fears about being borged at work, where my boss keep pressuring me to go full-time, or to at least work four full days a week, writing marketing copy. No, I say! No! Must . . . not . . . stop . . . thinking. . . .

Strangely enough, this also mirrors a NY Times editorial today, called "The Price of Incuriosity." Bush may look like Curious George, but he's really Incurious George.

It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then to "loosen up." Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a "social thinker." I began to think alone to relax, I told myself but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.

That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's. I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself. I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"

One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job."

This gave me a lot to think about. I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."

"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!" "But Honey, surely it's not that serious." "It is serious,"she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!"

"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently. She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama. "I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door.

I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors...They didn't open. The library was closed. To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night. As I sank to the ground, clawing at the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye.

"Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked.

You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker's Anonymous poster. Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker.

I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting. I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed... easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking.

I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.

South Pacific Adventures!

Wow, I just heard that Rob's taking a job at the University of Guam on a three-year contract and will be heading out of Detroit some time this summer. There's a big climate shift. It's a 24-hour, $1,500 plane trip from NYC, and then five hours or so to Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Seoul and, best of all, Kyoto. Rob and I are already tentatively planning a visit with a junket to Kyoto together.

What a huge leap into the unknown! What an adventure! I'm a little envious, I must say, though I don't think Guam's the place for me. You never know, though. It'll certainly be an interesting visit. Of course, the first thing we both thought of is . . . food. Pan-Asian cuisine! Fresh seafood! I'm also looking forward to exploring the reefs. I'll have to at least go snorkeling, and get a good pair of reef shoes.

Warming up the passport (for Kyoto, at least), even now.

Afraid of the Dark

Among the many other titles I could have given this post—including "The Stupidity of Bureaucrats"—I think the one I chose expresses the kernal of truth in two stories from the Times that happened to juxtapose themselves in my mind. I'll mention them in the order I read them and maybe that will recreate the experience at some level.

The first story, is about a chalk artist with a BFA, James de la Vega, busted for drawing illegally on the side of a building. His prior conviction was a mistake, because he'd been given permission to do the mural he was engaged in when the cops busted him, but by the time the building owner got to him, he'd already been booked and arraigned. Apparently there is no appeal from graffiti crimes. Since this is the artist's second offense, he could do 30 days in jail. Most of his local Harlem community doesn't consider his work graffiti and much of it is commissioned by local residents. He has his own gallery on Lexington at 104th Street. [Gothamist also has a post about this, with lots of juicy comments.]

On the surface, this looks like a "quality of life" crime, like busting guys pissing in the subway. Considering the quality of de la Vega's work and his personal demographics, I think what's really bothering the very priggish sounding prosecutor is not just the act, but the locations and the content: "'Beauty magazines make my girlfriend feel ugly,' penned on the sides of fitness clubs on the Lower East Side. Or, 'The best remedy for a cheap person is to have him pay for everything,' scrawled on banks and expensive restaurants near Wall Street. . . . a 5-by-7-foot mural of Fidel Castro smoking a cigar and wearing a Yankees cap [and a Che Guevara T-shirt], with the caption, 'Even Fidel Is a Yankee.'" De la Vega has also done a Guernica-like mural in East Harlem called "Slaves of our Past and Present." (Colin Powell and John Negroponte had the tapestry version of Guernica covered behind them at their press conference at the UN announcing the decision to invade Iraq.) As good art does, it challenges the status quo, twists reality just a little bit to a different, largely unheard point of view. Like Diego Rivera's murals (including the one destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller), it's not "nice" art.

Of course, one man's art is another man's graffiti, too, and apparently only certain groups of people get to define what art is, or when art is allowed to exist and in what form. Which leads into the second story, which is an op-ed piece by Michael Chabon, about a student at at the San Francisco Academy of Art University who wrote an American Psycho-esque story for a freshman creative writing seminar there, and subsequently got himself expelled and his instructor, Jan Richman, fired (or "non-renewed" as one says of adjuncts). The story rose out of an assignment to read David Foster Wallace's "The Girl with Curious Hair," and was apparently very bloody and vivid and disturbing enough that Richman asked for advice in how to deal with it in class. A fellow instructor suggested assigning the first chapter of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones by way of contrast, to illustrate the difference between gratuitous and necessary goriness. Eventually, however, the student was ratted out to the cops by the administration, who investigated, had him profiled by a criminal profiler (which came to nothing and was not even an open homicide investigation), and shipped home to Seattle. Richman was told to gather character references from her colleagues, and then fired mid-year. (Better yet, no one in the administration had even heard of David Foster Wallace.)

SFGate covered the full story, but Chabon's op-ed piece is what I drew the title of this post from. It's basically a defense of the dark places that artists and writers (and teenagers) go to in the creation of work. Chabon writes:

The destructive impulse is universal among children of all ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and fascination in adolescence, and thereafter never entirely goes away. Violence and hatred, and the fear of our own inability to control them in ourselves [my emphasis], are a fundamental part of our birthright, along with altruism, creativity, tenderness, pity and love. It therefore requires an immense act of hypocrisy to stigmatize our young adults and teenagers as agents of deviance and disorder. It requires a policy of dishonesty about and blindness to our own histories, as a species, as a nation, and as individuals who were troubled as teenagers, and who will always be troubled, by the same dark impulses.

The First Amendment issues are obvious and don't need mentioning here, since Chabon defines them quite eloquently without any help from me. What resonated with me was the line I emphasized in the quotation above, and it did so because I've written some fairly dark pieces myself. The first one I wrote, which explores the kind of training Special Forces units receive, scared the hell out of me; it was hard to admit that I could actually imagine the brutality I was writing about, harder still to imagine people did this kind of stupid crap to each other for a supposedly higher good. I don't think most people imagine their tax dollars are paying for this kind of thing, any more than they imagine what's really going on at Guantanamo Bay.

But the point is that someone is always imagining it and a small number of people, some of them supported by your tax dollars, are actually doing these things. If reported on in the media, they don't seem to make much of an impression because they're dismissed as propaganda of the "liberal media." Art, however, seems to get people's attention in a hurry. It disturbs them, offends them, annoys them, scares them. Whether it can make them think is another matter. As Dorothy Parker said, "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."

Chabon is writing primarily about the over-protective impulse to maintain the innocence of children (and this student was hardly a child), but I think part of the issue here is that art is another way to wake people up, and to explore what happens when you go into those dark places. When you do, there are two choices: you can indulge them, or you can rein them in. Making art out of them is a way of reining them in. Sure words and images are powerful but art never killed anyone, except metaphorically.

Mystery/SF writer George C. Chesbro has a character named Veil Kendry whose only way of dealing with his own violent impulses is to paint what he sees in his vivid and lucid dreams. Isn't it better to pick up a pen or a brush or a piece of chalk than a knife or a gun?

A Day on the Town

I'm cribbing this a bit from my Long Meg Production Blog post of yesterday, but I wanted to expand on it, just because I had such a nice day and did some stuff I haven't done in a while. It's been a long time since I've enjoyed the things the city offers, mostly because I've been so busy with publishing and writing projects. Now that I'm setting my own schedule on those and not relying on someone else, I can budget my time as I see fit, which was the whole point of living like this anyway. How did I let that get away from me?

So I went to the lieberry (i.e., the New York Public Library, the gigantic research library with the Lions out front), one of my favorite buildings, where I've spent many a happy hour fishing around for information. I was doing some research for Jen, who has a book coming out from Penguin next year called Black Bodies and Paradoxical Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics, and I'm feeding her bits and pieces of info to round out her essays. So I took the train down to Grand Central, grabbed some lunch at the Grand Central Market's Wild Edibles, and hiked over to the library on Fifth. I sat in the courtyard at one of the little French garden cafe tables and watched the tourists wandering around gawking, and admired the stark lines of the trees against stone and sky. They weren't in bud yet, and the day had clouded up by the time I got off the train, so it was just the dark shades of charcoal bark against the grey stone and skyscrapers. Everything seemed in such sharp relief though that it was almost like a photograph.

I spent the next few hours poking around for early examples of fraud in science, then realized that most of the books I might have a shred of hope of finding it in were in the 34th Street Science, Business, and Industry Library, so I quit for the day (it was 4:00 by then) and wandered into the Ninety from the Nineties: A Decade of Printing exhibit, which is not to be missed. One of my favorites was Julie Chen's Bon Bon Mots: A Fine Assortment of Books, which is a boxed set of five miniature books arranged like a box of chocolates. One of them was a kind of origami bracelet, which I'm sure there's a name for that I'm ignorant of, and I was really intigued by that one, especially. The other one that really impressed me was a slipcased and boxed pop-up book of one of Adrienne Rich's poems, "Batterer," which was all done in shocking and violent red and black, and popped up into a landscape. Strangely enough, I mostly ignored the books in the typography cases, although I love type. I think right now I'm more interested in the sculptural nature of books and the amazing and clever things you can do with their bindings. I want to go back here with Marcia and take a little more time with it; there's a lot I didn't see.

Also completely missed the Drawings of Charles Addams, the Gutenberg Bible, and The Art Deco Bookbindings of Pierre Legrain and Rose Adler. The gang on both the Book Arts and Paper Arts lists have been talking about both of the book exhibits, so I definitely want to go to them with Marcia too.

Then I took myself off to Pier One to look for a couple of baskets to throw my old catalogs and magazines in for recycling and also found a nice little secretaire for my foyer, and then back to GCT, where I stopped at the Transit Authority Museum Annex and took a look at the Daniel Greene: Subway Paintings exhibit. I've laways had a thing for Hyperrealism, so I really liked these. They're dark without being broody(or muddy), and highly atmospheric, even the portraits.

Of course, I coudln't get out of GCT without going into Posman Books, where I bought The Spiral Staircase, and Dark Matter.

Strangely enough, in one of those bizarre moments of serendipitous concatenation, Dark Matter dovetailed nicely with the research I'd been doing for Jen earlier. (O how our subconcious betrays us!) I'd been looking up the history of alchemy, which was loaded with fraud, and forgotten (if I ever knew it) that Sir Isaac Newton was an alcehmist too. In the first chapter of the book, he's the object of a fairly spectacular example of alchemical fraud in a demonstration of purported transmutation. Of course, it's not transmutation, and Newton fairly simply unmasks it, being the clever lad he is, but it got me wondering if the incident is drawn from his life. If so, I'd love to find documentation of it for Jen because it would be such a great addition to her book, since he's such an important figure in "the annals of physics." Suppose I'll have to scour one or more of his biographies. Oh, darn.

And so, as Pepys would say, to bed.

Gone to Soldiers

Em sent me this image this morning, gleaned from the blog American Leftist. In the words of the artist, "It's a mosaic composed of the photos of the American service men and women who have died in Iraq. No photograph is used more than three times." This is one of those instances where a picture, or hundreds of them, are worth a thousand words.

I've been saving up topics to blog about, hoping to jump start this again. I've been so busy with work and settling into the new apartment (which I'd decided nobody but me wanted to hear about) that I haven't been blogging or even thinking much. I'd more or less given up blogging about the war, in part because other people, particularly George Paine of Warblogging and Christopher Allbritton of Back to Iraq 3.0 do it so much better than I do, and with so much more dedication, but after the Falluja offense and the current uprising (which I think really is an uprising, as opposed to the isolated protests the government claims it is.), I feel compelled to say something, if only to keep pointing out what a huge freaking mistake this whole endeavor was, and how duplicitious the Bush administration has been (as becomes clearer every day) in dragging the U.S. into this.

A couple of weeks ago, the Village Voice published four tabloid pages of casualties, outlining in detail the deaths of US soldiers since Bush stood on the deck of that carrier, disgracing his flight suit, and gave a novel version of the bird to his constituents with the same thumb he's been sitting on since taking office. It is an abominable toll for such a lie. On my old blog, I tried to keep a running tally of casualties on both sides, and I may have to do that again, along with setting up the links I had there.

Also a couple of weeks ago, my cousin Gary (son of my dad's brother), who's been a marine for most of his life, got in contact with me, having tracked me down via my website. There aren't a lot of Kottners in the world, apparently, and we all seem to be related to each other. Gary credits Dad, who was a 20 year Air Force veteran and a 20 year civil service employee, with getting him interested in the armed forces and aviation, and yet, wow, they're politically polar opposites. Dad hates Bush, and though he thinks the troops are and have been getting a raw deal (they get charged for their hospital meals when they're recovering from combat wounds!), he hates this war as much as I do. Gary, bless his heart, sent me a photo from a Navy vessel somewhere that had been stenciled with the numbers of casualties from the accumulated terrorist attacks in the last ten years (various embassies, marine barracks, the USS Cole, the WTC), below the legend "Why we are here." I didn't reply to it because the only civil thing I could think to say was "I wish it were that simple." Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, gives that notion the lie.

Then Em sends this picture. You'd think she was trying to cattle prod me, or something.