back from japan

Tim, the guy next to me, made putters for a living in West Palm and was completely non-plussed by the massive turbulence just off the coast of Siberia while I stared straight ahead, yet again, and mouthed "Hail Mary"s, ten hours to go. When I got back I kept hearing about some deal for docks that made it sound like terrorists were about to buy into our infrastructure so they could smuggle in dirty bombs and anthrax but so far as I can read it doesn't seem like this is the case. So now the Democrats are fear-mongering? Is there not one government official who can simply represent, to the best of her ability, her constituency and try to do right by them? Instead of this constant wave of manipulation?

I hate being afraid of flying, what would Gus Grissom think? Here's a quote from Gus:

"If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."
-Gus Grissom (John Barbour et al., Footprints on the Moon (The Associated Press, 1969), p. 125.)

Goddamn Gus, he truly had the righteous stuff..."the conquest of space is worth the risk of life", how many people still believe that beautiful thought? Probably people would do their Derrida and worry about use of the word "conquest" and mumble that it indicates streaks of imperialism and is typical of cold war blah blah blah, but Gus knew it was just about the willingness to explore past fear. There's your fucking conquest.

And so I was sitting on the plane sick of myself thinking about Gus Grissom and wondering if this was actually a civil war starting in Iraq or just another belch of violence so when I got home I thought I should go to antiwar.com where I found the reassuring news that civil war or not, things are not just beginning to suck more but they've been sucking more for awhile now, from Stars and Stripes (Feb. 25):
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More than 550 attacks took place in Iraq from Aug. 29, 2005, to Jan. 20, 2006, according to the latest “security and stability” report the Defense Department is required to send lawmakers every four months.

Speaking to Pentagon reporters Friday, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs said that the survey’s conclusions “were not good,” but that “loving us is not what it’s about.”
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So civil war or not, that would just be another feather in our cap of suck we've managed over there. And in a cab to Alphabet City with the city a string of pearls to my right I began to really sweat because the cabbie had the news station on and they said our fearless fear-mongering president was taking another look at health care and that his trusty shotgun sheriff of a veep was looking at making Russia an enemy again because why not? We need more enemies because doesn't it say something in the bible about keeping your friends close but your enemies closer? Well, hell, it should and Russia's been playing it loose with the liberty stuff under Putin and from what I understand Jesus is about freedom for people like us and the Russians aren't like us, that's for damn sure, communist just under the skin, so we gotta watch out for them, they're like caterpillers and it's spring. And those butterflies are red. So the veep is re-writing our contact rules with Russia but that's good because the terrorist movies coming out aren't as good as Top Gun because you have to be careful and the terrorists always turn out to be bank robbers and anyway, more of our spies speak Russian.

Back briefly to this UAE deal to take our ports and smuggle bombs into our country. Wait, so they made diplomatic relations with the Taliban?!? You mean like our allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia? And so the terrorists flew out of a central Middle Eastern hub?!? One that houses the headquarters of Ford? Should Ford pull out of the UAE right now!?!? I mean, Dubai is just a bunch of Arab terrorists.

So should Johnson and Johnson, FedEx, Motorola, Lockheed-Martin and all the other firms there. If some terrorists passed through there and weren't captured, what the hell is Portland, Maine's excuse? You mean they have a big airport in the UAE? I want to fight the Bush regime whenever I can. But the grounds for resisting this deal can only be made on different philosophical grounds, if you believe in capitalism, this deal is just a deal of the rich and the rich. Worse deals happen here everyday, in terms of impact on the American people. Get angry about bank fees, they impact you much more, everyday. Not the fact that some rich Arabs are making deals with rich Americans in the economic stratosphere where access is limited to the seven, eight and nine zeroes club.

Meanwhile they're about to make it harder for consumers to shop for airline tickets because the airlines are upset that people can compare prices, so their lobbyists are getting their congressmen to start getting a bill together that will allow them to obfusicate the charges incurred in airports and the hell with you and me because you and me don't have what they have, and we'll see how well our freedom is defended then. You know, our freedom to know things like how much it will cost to go home and see mom. American things like that. Seeing mom. But damn if we won't cut the Arabs out of making the same money we let Europeans and Japanese make, because their Arab and Arabs don't believe in Jesus and who the hell knows what the Japanese believe in but the shrines are pretty and they don't hijack airplanes like the Arabs. All the Arabs. Let's out McCarthy McCarthy and while we're getting the Reds and Arab sympathizers out of the universities (a growing movement for "affirmative action" for the very repressed class of conservitives found in such tomes as "America's 101 Most Dangerous Professors" which doesn't worry about Holocaust deniers but does charge quite a few thinkers with being feminists); let's just get the Arabs out because it's important, if they're going to be our enemies, to not give them any more money.

We'll have to put up a barb-wire fence around Brighton Beach and rename it a bay by the by. Guantanimo and Brighton and if you want to talk about habeas corpus why don't you speak English you terrorist-lover pinko?

The Democrats seem cool with it because they got to prove they're macho and that they don't like terrorists either. If all these goddamn wusses didn't like terrorists so much things would be ok. And God forbid running against a fascist who can accuse you of loving terrorism when he loves freedom. We all love our freedom so much that thank God we don't need it for our beliefs. Squeaky clean and hating terrorists. I like warm beds, oceans and chocolate. I hate mosquitos, garbage and terrorists. The whole debate about trying to stop terrorism is made up and fought through images and ideas created by those images. Any real policy discussion does not exist because it doesn't fit into the structure of a campaign cycle. And who wants to actually differentiate himself and inject subtlety into the debate. Subtlety can be spun and wasn't it the great democrat Cromwell who said "subtlety can deceive you, integrity never will"? Well, we got all kinds of integrity making decisions of policy. Can I please have some subtlety, the joy of distinction?

The thing is, it took a real human being to fucking explore space, to put his ass right there on top of a rocket full of rocket fuel and go see what it was like up there, and he knew exploration was the everything, meanwhile more and more of us seem to be heading for the bunker and only leaving with guns firmly in hand; Gus was alone up there and he knew, you go up there against yourself, the conquest was to make a thing your friend. It's not a man and a gun, it's not Shane. No gun. What good is a gun anyway? I keep thinking of this soldier in Gunner Palace, "I don't think ... anywhere in history has someone killed someone else and something better has come out of it. It's just ... not possible." Gus went to war, he signed up against the fascists and the communists but in the end that was all noise against the silence above. For the truly righteous there is something beyond looking tough or even worried about being tough, it's about knowing what's truly at stake.

For awhile, after World War II, Gus flipped burgers and thought about "what comes next", next was space; I doubt he would have held his death against the stars. Because the correct answer to the question of what to do after tragedy is not "go and hide" or "point fingers" or "attack a country that has not provoked us with the absolute arrogance that because we're who we are everything will work out exactly as we expect it and everything will be better for everybody". The correct answer is engage, explore. Pretty much everybody thought Gus Grissom would be the first man to walk the moon, and, as his words indicate, he would have wanted to be the last man to stand in the way of humanity walking on the moon and exploring the vast domain of Creation. Two years later another Midwesterner walked the moon instead. Two years after the tragedy of 9/11 some shithead wore a flightsuit and said everything was ok, the mission was accomplished, what mission exactly? And now, three years after that, whatever jumbled ideas of mission, empire, money and idealism that shithead has are firmly and seriously fucked and this is a nation bereft of curiosity and the true idea of the higher, making decisions apparently on deluded ideas of security and machismo, you know, "traditional values". The Calvinistic streak of our nature has won out, what God we see is an invention entirely of the human and the moon is just the moon. God a self-help book, His ways easily understood to those who believe exactly like they're supposed to.

Go Cubs.

I'm about to go and catch up on the spring training reports, in other words, I'm about to call Corms.

Just a final note, in the pictures, you'll see "The Annunciation" by Turner. And one of Audrey in Rome.

my students rule

Fucking guy jumped into the train today at Pacific/Atlantic. Literally hurled himself into the train and freaked this girl out. It was so crowded at that point I just stared at the guy's back and hated him. He looked out the window, first at the void and then at the Financial District, I stared at his back and hated him. Then I looked at the Financial District too, a bunch of broken shapes and then the signs of Chinatown and the delivery trucks all in a line, dirty white and some with graffiti before going back under the ground.

You're up, you're down, soon you're at Union Square dodging people half-late for first period.

Luckily I don't teach first. Anyway, today I was in a sour mood in the morning because I had the wrong shoes on and I was afraid the snow was destroying them among other things. And I was thinking about how nice it would be to not have to worry about time and then I started thinking about Kirchner, Nolde and Ernst, all the clutter of war and the muddy palettes and how that color was in all the shady streets and I wanted to wander around and think and maybe go look at some art, something I never do these days.

Then all the teachers, looking stressed out, the feeling I get around them that they consider me pretty unprofessional and me trying to look innocuous while the elevator meanders the numbers, always very aware at those moments of my Chucks and t-shirt and trying to think about what I'm supposed to be teaching to avoid thinking about my failure to completely enter adulthood.

Then I got to second period, teased a couple kids, got through the first Reconstruction lesson and really felt the kids were picking it up. Some really good questions, some curiousity but mostly just a sense of aliveness that never feels as real from anywhere else. Fuck, I could care less how inspired these kids are to learn history, look up and down history and most people just cared about eating and not dying horribly, I'm just always impressed by how much fun they make things. Today there were all these balloons and candy and an amazing amount of teasing, huge cards and clumsy first attempts at love which tend to be more charming than what follows. I don't think I tell them enough how much I believe in them, that'll be tomorrow at some point.

I don't want to bring up Cheney shooting some guy in the face and chest, but some guys, everything they touch they fuck up -- Cheney's one of those I think. So I just can't be surprised, meanwhile Scalia is calling people that disagree with him about how widely the Constitution can be interrupted "idiots". Charming, but the mind's mushy and ready for bed...I should sign out...

all through the night

The room is very small, seven feet by six feet maybe, and it reminds me of my friend's room on Boxwood when I was growing up, the same room we used for a little den in our apartment, I would sleep over there and it was where I first listened to pop music, my friend's room. Whenever I slept over I would fall asleep last, never completely comfortable with being away from my house. We had moved out of the apartments a few years earlier and instead of sharing a backyard with seven other families, we had our own. Usually I threw a ball against the garage, anyway, whenever I slept over at this friend's house we'd stay up late playing football, baseball or River Raid on the Atari and everybody would be asleep by the time we stopped and then he'd drop off after some confessional talk about girls or some idiot story out of hand and I'd be alone listening to pop music, the modern stuff: Bryan Adams, Phil Collins, Shannon, Foreigner, Madonna and etc. But it was this song by Cyndi Lauper, "All Through the Night", that I'd always hear and it was so dramatic and sad to me that it'd be the last thing I thought about before falling asleep. What were these mysteries of adulthood awaiting me?

Anyway, I heard it tonight, and I started thinking about not being able to sleep at my best friend's house until that song played, that late night dj probably just out of college talking about free tickets as I dropped off, and I thought man, some things you never escape from.

I saw Goodfellas over the weekend at the IFC Center on 4th and 6th. They don't let you in until the movie's just about to start, so forget about getting properly prepared, which annoyed me to no end and took me out of the movie for the first ten minutes or so, but then I remembered why I miss DeNiro so much and got totally into it and tried not to think about how I had just idiotically walked into a wall. Ruined my glasses, but I'll take care of that after Tokyo. Goodfellas is wonderful for its matter-of-factness, this is no opera which is why the Derek and the Dominos moment sticks out so much, but what's interesting to me as I was remembering that song with the helicopter -- why does memory work like that?

There's all kinds of debate all over the websites about Iraq in terms of leaks and such, with some talking about compromise and the necessity of security and concealment and others talking about transparency and it feels like another stage in the argument over Bush's presidency, as if we've just gotten tired of talking about his ineptitude, his moral crusade, his lack of interest in serious domestic policy and government bureaucracy and so we pick this area which is, on the surface, politically neutral so we can talk about the consequences of his presidency without resort to obvious partisanship. But the issue is, to what degree must a democratic government be transparent and at what point do we have to trust our elected officials to continue to value what we supposedly hold as necessary in an elected government? The Left is all about transparency right now and the right is all about "they're trying to kill us" without telling us who, how and how relevant is this to our lives? Because to tell us would be, in theory, to invite them in. But is there an absolute in this debate? When we were talking about blowjobs the argument was reversed, so in the end this is just another argument about whether you support Bush or not. The fact is, he hasn't earned the right to hide anything from us because he is a lie wrapped in an untruth.

I wonder if all those tax breaks were worth some birdshot in the face? It's finally come to Cheney just taking shots at anything and frankly, it's kind of exciting. Maybe Iran is next?

Meanwhile, others wounded by Cheney's carelessness and idiocy are having a harder time recovering ( http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/national/12WOUNDED.html?ei=5070&en=f343e2b6c5968e8b&ex=1139979600&pagewanted=all ) and while we're covered in snow in New York worrying about Michelle Kwan there's a political fatigue so set in that I don't believe we have the will to believe that we can actually change anything of the various quagmires this administration of believers have involved us in. Plus, it's ok, this war, they told us so ( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11299206/site/newsweek/ ).

The blizzard has been beautiful, but a cabbie told me today a lot of city workers didn't show up, calling off from Yonkers and etc. We agreed that with the latest labor deals and the way this city talks about its workers in the papers, it really wasn't a surprise that the motivation to make things work wasn't super-strong. The guy honked his horn at everything and cursed every moron stupid enough to cross the street, he told me I could blame his driving on Hamas and meanwhile even Broadway wasn't well-plowed, this at around nine in the evening about ten or twelve hours after the snow had stopped.

Watched "The Fallen Idol" at Film Forum. It's Carol Reed's picture right before "The Third Man" and it was fun, told from a child's point of view with some beautiful shots and the kid was great, the exact opposite of smarmy and all in all he seemed like a kid from a completely different world; this is a kid that very definately did not have gamecube. Still, Film Forum has to be the worst place to see a movie in the city. It's top to bottom arty with crappy popcorn and a terrible candy counter and while I was vainly searching for something like candy (they had baked goods, why am I going to take a chance on the baked goods of a place that can't even make proper popcorn) the guy next to me was ordering peppermint and cozy chamomile teas and really, that just isn't it for a movie, and if it is for him, I guess he's got his nirvana, meanwhile I want to break something, chamomile? I could hear that bastard slurping the first ten minutes of the movie. I know it was him. The screens are pretty small and they don't take credit, they're snotty about that, as if it's some badge of business courage and ethics not to accept credit. The seats suck. The drinks are small but just as expensive. Meanwhile, I just want to watch a movie in relative comfort and have some kind of choice at the candy counter while not having to run back out into the world for money; I try to avoid that place and had managed to for a couple years, but all the reasons for my boycott came flooding back tonight, but meanwhile, it WAS showing a hell of a film. Fuckers.

If you're going to have chamomile you better have m&ms. And if you're going to charge $10.75 per ticket, why not give us some credit? Fuckers.

Fuckers.

It's places like Film Forum that make me upset at New York. That elitism of taste, in the end, it's as tacky as any Rob Schneider movie. Ah, it makes me miss the Music Box so much. I know there's a difference between a Carol Reed movie and an Adam Shankman movie, but watching a Carol Reed movie or a Bergman movie should put you MORE in touch with the world, not less in touch with it, meanwhile a movie that has little relationship to "the truth", such as "Bringing Down the House" should be, and probably is, more likely to be the favored film of somebody less aware of the world and less interested in creating a serious concept of individual truth and social and political philosophy. A film like "Bruce Almighty" is probably the favored film of many to be wary of. So anyway, the elitism thing creates dissonance, here's a truth, Film Forum sucks.

this endless cold

http://antiwar.com/lind/?articleid=8486

Above is an interesting article, creative and thought provoking.

The subway was halting this morning and everybody looked bored except the kids, who were loud, full of life and happy. Going to school? Who knew?

My voice is still quite a bit gone, but all the aches of my complaint disappeared, leaving me relatively peaceful. The studenten have been pretty on the ball lately but the new contract has begun and, as expected, it works poorly.

I'm all moved to Park Slope now, though there have been complications and obstructions and now there are a bunch of boxes in the common room that need hiding or placing. Aida, the landlady, has been anything but pleasant, which after the last landlady is a plunge back into the cold water of reality, but in the end she's just another bit of noise in a crowded hall.

Off to sleep and sending good vibes to Draezy with her second audition.

Over the next few weeks it will be interesting to see what develops with Iran. With Bush in the White House there is no end of grief, no end to vicious misleading.