Oh to be Chris Ware...

Today my employer and I wheeled/walked to Central Park. We sat in a pagoda by the pond, its opaque surface the color of lime peels. Turtles and turtle shells frequently emerged and submerged.

HIM. Where do you see yourself in five years? (His speech slightly impeded by the presence of a cough drop.)

ME. I want to have a substantial body of published written work. (I don't fucking know.) What would you have answered when you were my age?

I visualize him physically capable of shrugging. It seemed appropriate.

HIM. I would have said the same as you.

Pause. Turtles.

HIM. But at that age my life was ruled by sexual conquest. All I was interested in was sex. And literature.

I think bitter thoughts, affairs and women weeping.

HIM. I wanted to find a woman who would change my life.

Isn't that what everyone wants. Not that he wasn't already forgiven.

ME. Did you?

HIM. Yes. When my first daughter was born.

We laugh. Then turtles sets in.

HIM. When I was 27 I married a 17 year-old.

I calculate... 1963.

ME. Did you have children?

HIM: Two daughters, one who loves me, one who doesn't.

ME: How old was your wi-

HIM: 18 the first and twenty the second. It was a horrible mistake. She was a drug addict. The girls had to take her to the emergency room more than once.

ME: Is she still alive?

HIM: Still a drug addict.

Long interlude of turtles.

HIM: Do you mind if we go back home now?

My whole day consisted of conversations like these, although it's easier to write about his skeletons and his closet than anything I shared with him. Before I went home for the afternoon, he gave me a copy of his book, dictating its inscription, "To Emily, my new friend." He asked me not to ask him questions about his memoirs. I won't.

APPENDIX
At one point he mentioned a turning point, when a one act play of his was produced for the first time.

HIM. I wish I still had a copy of it. Have you had anything produced?

ME. Right now.

Meaning that you can buy tickets online for The Nostalgic Recollections of Raymond Boggs, part of The American Living Room Festival. If you have run into me in the past couple of days then you have a brochure already, if not go to www.here.org.

Poor us. We were so close to seeing David Foster Wallace and George Saunders, and the theater filled up right as we had nearly reached the door. It's okay. Sangria and rubbery calamari provided solace. I've been working for this man, covering for a friend who is doing a play in Poland. He has MS, and I help him type and turn pages as he cannot do these things. His wheelchair is operated by mouthpiece and head button. He has many famous friends who I type e-mails to and aid in telephoning to arrange dinners with champagne and other treats. He is writing a film review of Visconti's The Leopard and with my friend is translating a play called "The Magnificent Cuckold" from French. I am very fond of him, and he has nice pets, particularly his cat Bones. I am very tired though.

I went to the Neil Young tribute in Prospect Park. It maybe wasn't quite as good as Leonard Cohen, but I was also separated from the stage by a large mass of people in constant motion. That part of it turned out to be more interesting than the concert itself, as people from MN and other remote sites of childhood development would walk by and then join in the consumption of cookies/cigarettes/blanket space. Anyway, I thought of you, if you weren't there, though chances are not so remote.

Lucky 13

The newest McSweeney's is worth the $25 investment. I haven't been able to say that for a long time.

Rebecca Works Hard and Will Be Very Successful

Thanks to the illustrious accomplishments of my roommate, I just got to go to a preview of Fahrenheit 9/11. It was good, although as usual I prefer the more abstract parts of the film to the ones where M. Moore is there to melodramatically guide your emotions. But then at one point the melodramatic part gets very spoiled and fucked up, in a bizarre triangular encounter that forms what I think is one of the film's best scenes. The bit of the film I saw five months ago (I don't want to give anything away but it is during the opening credits and the part on September 11th) remained the most eerily arresting of the whole project. I got to go with Rebecca to the wrap party at Soho House, which I'd only heard of because someone paid me to write up a movie treatment for her story idea, described as "Sex in the City Gone Bad." Needless to say, Soho House and the words "a clingy Missoni dress" shared a paragraph in her initial description, but with fois gras and a glowing rooftop swimming pool to schmooze around I'm not going to complain. It was pretty. A word of warning though: The SoHo House is not in SoHo, but rather in the Meatpacking District. ("Ringworm is neither a ring or a worm, it is a fungus," recall those who read Matt Groening as children.) I hung out with the bassist from Ween. He's only been with the band for six years but we mutually lamented the demise of songs like Poop Ship Destroyer in the mainstream vernacular of music. It was exciting.

I actually think this movie is going to be more politically influential than maybe any other American film ever. It is slated to open this weekend (according to Moore) in 800 theaters, a number unprecedented even for his own record-breaking precedents. Bowling for Columbine apparently never played more than 250 theaters at a time. It's really amazing. In a war where we have seen little televised images, the images in the movie strike really hard. Maybe it's just because I've only been reading books about war for the past two months, but it's always shocking to see the violence and the open wounds and injuries. You start to think of violence on such abstract humanitarian terms until you actually see someone's tibia exposed.

War lit is interesting... every book has a chapter on the glorification of war and the feeling the soldiers have of acting out their own movie -- it's a fantasy that is simultaneously shattered by the trauma of actually being there and perpetuated by the recording of it in the non-fiction recreation of the drama. I don't know why I like it so much. It isn't the violence -- I actually had to put Dispatches and Black Hawk Down down for a little while, because they were making me nauseous -- but rather that they can work as Saramago's Blindness did fictionally, questioning order and comfort and how very fragile the threads holding things in place are. Particularly when you are contrasting people who grew up sitting on a couch eating Fritos with people who have had violence around them their entire lives. Blindness also made me want to throw up. More than the other two even. But there's something about filling out an experience only seen from a position of comfort and then in 2-dimensions. In Homage to Catalonia when Orwell comes along and talks about how having lice in his underwear is such an undiscussed and unavoidable part of the military experience -- It's just not what you are thinking of when you watch Saving Private Ryan.

I Never Leave Brooklyn Anymore

On 5th Avenue in Park Slope there is a veterinary clinic that also serves as a boarding house for cats whose owners are on vacation. It is a very nice respite when I'm working to go watch the cats for a little bit. They are in rows and columns, each sitting or sleeping or stretching on its own towel.

I saw L'Avventura today. I finished reading Black Hawk Down. I covered an anti-arena ralley for the Brooklyn Eagle. I did laundry. I stared at the wall. I decided Great Lakes makes my list of top three bars in New York. It would be higher if they had Scrabble in addition to Trivial Pursuit and such good music. Good music makes me happier than almost anything. I started to read Godel, Escher, Bach. My brother told me that I won't understand the math. I'm hoping that it won't matter, because he's right. I only bought it because it was two dollars. I finished the 10 billionth draft of my play, which is about 9.9 billion drafts too many for something only thirty pages long. Especially because the last version was better and after the director agrees with me I'm throwing this one away. I don't know what sucks and what doesn't anymore. When I revise something that much the removed words sort of pile up in my head, in their isolation like radioactive waste, such that discarded passages like "she had a word with our sponsor, and then she stepped on it. The sponsor? No, the moth," or phrases like "a fear of double-chinned anonymity" are going to give me brain cancer maybe. They don't go away.

Sometimes I wish Saturday nights were Monday nights, when boredom is so much more publicly ordained. I feel rotten.

You studied what? Symbiotics?

"It was not only Glass who defined himself as a Brown semiotician. From its founding as a fledgling program in 1974 to its morphing into a full Department of Modern Culture and Media in 1996, Brown semiotics produced a crop of creators that, if they don't exactly dominate the cultural mainstream, certainly have grown famous sparring with it. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, Academy Award-nominated director Todd Haynes and legendary indie producer Christine Vachon, "Ice Storm" author Rick Moody, pop-science writer Steven Johnson -- all walked the slanting corridors of Adams House, a sad cottage at the fringe of Brown's Providence campus. There at the bottom of College Hill, under the aegis of an august English professor, an academic discipline sprang up that would make some parents very worried and some students very successful."

More.

The Pigeon: The Pinnacle of All That is Avian, or Mere Winged Rat?

"Meanwhile, the pigeon wars escalate, and avian battles fought in Central London cause human accidents, injuries and deaths. Everyone looks fearfully at the sky -- ''It was as if the whole of London had visited the same deranged chiropractor'' -- and antipigeon vigilantes, from whom Ken Livingstone might learn a thing or two, band together."

In Fiction...

"We're the hard-core part of the pigeon movement," said Bob, who asked that his last name not be used but who is the founder of Bird Operations Busted, an organization that has about 15 members. "Our aim is to unveil the mafia of netters," he said in hushed tones, seated in an Upper West Side cafe.

And the news...

The debate rages on.

LVT Double Header

"So let's get it over with: Dear Lars, thank you for the obstructions. They have taught me to see what I really am: a miserable human being. I try as humans do, to fool the world and myself, because I don't want to admit it.

My trick is cheap and I repeat it endlessly. I came up with it early on: If I just tell what I see and nothing else, and keep doing so, like the prisoner of war who repeats nothing but his name and number, not adding anything (emotions are far too dangerous for me) maybe the world - and I, too - will buy it. 

I call it art. But in fact I am certain that I am capable of nothing. 
And I only do it all to be able to stand myself."

The Text of Obstruction #5, written by Lars Von Trier for the voice of Jorgen Leth.

Dogwood (Sunday), The Five Obstructions (Monday) I love I love 2x

OK, so the zoo was really fun and all, there were very nice sloths with little hands, but after petting a goat at the children's zoo an unidentified insect or arachnid took a chomp on my arm that has since developed into an itchy series of small bumps. Nothing good can come without a little pain. Not even a marvelous place like the zoo.

I should be going to sleep

But instead I just activated my new g-mail account. 1000 MB! So gangsta. Speaking of G-thangs, I watched the Ali G movie for the first time tonight until I realized that birds were chirping and home was a whole borough away. It is always strange how empty the city can be in the very late night. For some reason, I always feel that 2 AM would be as busy as 6 AM, but if you've ever taken the subway at 6 AM on a weekday it is packed and in the wee hours when the birds just start chirping you can sometimes be the only person in a car. There is something rather wonderful about being able to walk down Broadway or Canal and pass maybe one person when just a few hours later you can barely move, or being able to cross the street at Columbus Circle without waiting for a walk light. For whatever reason though, the street below my window never ever calms down, to the extent where the silences created by red lights are deafening. I hear them louder than the traffic at this point. I suppose if it did grow as empty as other parts of the city walking home would be a bit more scary but I can never cross without a walk light and yesterday when I "dusted" the windowsill the paper towels came up black. One can only imagine my lungs, who sleep directly underneath. If I can manage the financial responsibility that it would entail, I may move in September. But that is a lot of financial responsibility. Carcinogens come so cheaply. And responsibility comes at such a huge price.

I am going to the zoo tomorrow! To the zoo!!

Today I saw three twelve year-olds (perhaps they were younger) get chased down Flatbush Avenue by car and handcuffed to each other, then loaded onto a van and driven away, all within the span of one piece of pizza. The cop to child ratio was app. 3:1. I don't know any other details.

Tomorrow I will see monkeys pee! The zoo! The ZOO! Zooooooo! Zebras. Gila monsters. Soft grunting animals with claws and wet noses all whiskered and velvety. The zoo!

Fleet Week: Big Boats and More

Surrounded by a gaggle of sailors, I went to see The Day After Tomorrow this afternoon. It was satisfyingly catastrophic, I will have sweet sweet dreams tonight of Jake Gyllenhall fighting bloodthirsty wolves and there were lots of opportunities to giggle. I was also pleased to see that in spite of recent history, apocalyptic movies will continue to honor the filmic tradition of at least one appearance by the Cyrillic alphabet. Then I come home and open the June issue of the Atlantic Monthly only to see a small paragraph on page 50 essentially repeating Dennis Quaid's hapless whistle-blowing speech to the thinly-veiled-as-Dick-Cheney Vice President. Except that it's an actual scientific report entitled, "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security." I couldn't find that but I did find this. It is with great joy that I anticipate the return of our friends the Saber Tooth Tiger and The Woolly Mammoth.

On a similar theme, in this month's Harper's Patrick Graham describes sorry attempts to put down the Iraqi resistance as a situation where "the production values are incredible but the script sucks," winning the award for clever metaphor of the week. He also noted, with a prescience we might call "research," that most Iraqis found Chalabi to be a scumbag: "the most pro-American -- and arguably least popular, less even than Saddam Hussein -- of Iraqi politicians." Oops.