Homeland security - tunnel duty

Back in January I took a couple of snaps of objects & graffiti inside of (through the windows) the little booth at the south end of the Whitehall R station where it goes under the river in what I think they used to call the Montague tunnel. The woe's of bored cops, tattered duty logs and scratchiti. I've tried a few times to improve the image there to the left, but never gotten anything useful, and of course I didn't think to transcribe the graffiti when I saw it. What I can make out is:

The only thing that would make this more
like my own personal hell would be to
... (not the "good old shit")
piped in along with "show tunes" and
"... country music" while fixed here
around the clock with me ....
... with Home and Garden
Network on the monitor and ....
.....

Shameless namedropping and promoting of friends 080825

Having dinner out tonight with friends, including Ted Haimes and Stephen Westphall. Wicked funny fellows. I remember Westphall as the single most - what, entertaining? charming? appreciative? - dinner guest we've ever had at home, maybe 7 or 8 or 9 years ago now. Salt baked shrimp, as I recall, was one of the dishes. 2006 Brooklyn Rail interview of SW by John Yau.

will wager that stumpy, dante, mel & the rest o' the gang...

will take issue with the person responsible for this anti-NYC
(well, maybe more of an anti-New-York-I-Love-You-da-movie) piece...

& dem commen's iz woit da prizuh admishun

Screwing around with "Carrying On"

One of my favorite pieces of public art in New York is Janet Zweig's Carrying On in the Prince Street R station. Lota and I went through there Saturday and.. uh oh, someone is screwing around with some of the pieces, using gray modeling clay. A la, nose, cock, and either banana or knife. Skanky phone-photos, but you get the idea.

Thinkin' logos

Of course, I've wanted to do this and a hundred more as soon as i saw Mel's post last week about the McCain / McCain logo similarity. Let's see where we can take it.

But before we leave Pepsiland, have you seen their false rumors page? I quote:

FALSE RUMOR ALERT: PATRIOTIC CANS

You've received an erroneous email about a "patriotic can" that Pepsi allegedly produced with an edited version of America's Pledge of Allegiance. The truth is, Pepsi never produced such a can. In fact, this is a hoax that has been circulating on the Internet for more than six years. A patriotic package used in 2001 by Dr Pepper (which is not a part of PepsiCo) was inappropriately linked to Pepsi. Thanks for giving us the chance to clarify the situation and please feel free to share this message with anyone else who may have received the erroneous email. Details of the hoax can be found at http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/undergod.asp.

Ah, but what could be more patriotic than the official ObamaCola?

Splurt 080820 (what Jiminey Pricket calls linky goodness)

• Cactus Games, via rhizome. Particularly Ad Nauseam 2 and Psycosomnium.
• Dinosaurs & Robots. I like this place.
• Blog Action Day. Yes. The Pentagon did levitate.
• Yakkay helmet, I tell myself I'd wear it if I could buy it. (I lie like a rug. Hey is for horses. Don't take offense, take the gate. So buttons...)

Mose Allison, where have I been?

We've seen more performers than you could shake a stick at over the last few weeks. One of the real standouts for me, and someone I (how is it possible?) only knew as a name before, was Mose Allison (wiki). I be blown away. Lori was a fan in the before times. I've been listening, the last few days, to a 1964 compilation - total wow. Everything sounds like it was written this morning. Maybe tomorrow morning. NPR profile here. Youtube here.

I can't believe the things I've seen
I wonder bout some things I've heard
Everybody's crying mercy
When they don't know the meaning of the word

Britney Spears spam

You all been getting variations on these? Last night I got two:

• Britney Spear's New Hair Extensions are Lindsay Lohan's Pubes
• Britney Spear Ditches Music Career, Enters Car Racing

I assume they're both true.
I haven't seen any official denials, though there was this at brittneyspears.org:

Britney Not Doing Stripper Movie

August 7th, 2008 •

• No Related Post

Filed Under: Miscellaneous

Britney Spears has refuted reports she has accepted a role in Quentin Tarantino’s next project as a “murderous lesbian stripper”.

British newspaper the Daily Mirror claims Spears was set to play exotic dancer Varla in a remake of the 1965 movie Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

But a spokesman for Spears denies she is working with Tarantino.

The representative says, “Though she definitely intends to explore acting roles down the road, right now she’s concentrating on recording her next album.”

Rejection @ the Flea

Composer friend Jennifer Griffith is a member of the Composer's Collaborative, and their current show is Rejection: a series of slips and falls. Happening this week. Go on, support a living composer! I dare you! The last piece of Jennifer's we saw performed was an opera based on sexual fantasies with Bill Clinton (Dream President). This was before the recent primary season, of course, back when reasonable people could have sexual fantasies with Bill.

T.A. Street Activist Network: Rally on Sunday Against "Suburbanizing" NYC

Street Activists,

This Sunday, T.A. will join an unprecedented coalition of environmental, transportation and planning groups to call attention to the glut of new parking turning traditionally transit-centered neighborhoods into suburban sprawl. We need you to stand with us, and help make an impact as we stand before the cameras and call on the Mayor to stop car-centric development here in NYC.

What: Press Conference
When: Sunday, August 17th, 12 pm
Where: Steps of City Hall, Manhattan
Who: American Planning Association, Environmental Defense Fund, Municipal Art Society, New York League of Conservation Voters, Pratt Center for Community Development, Regional Plan Association, Straphangers' Campaign, Transportation Alternatives,Tri-State Transportation Campaign

You've seen condos and residential towers sprouting up around the city. But what you may not know is that most of these buildings are required by the city to build parking to match - a lot of it. So much parking, that by 2030 we'll add 170,000 MORE cars to NYC, and 1 billion more miles to the odometers in this city - and that's above what we'd have if new residents just maintained the driving patterns we have today. This has to stop, before it's too late. Join us as we release our report, "Suburbanizing the City," and call attention to the city's impending traffic crisis.

do you HBO?

me not able to, but iffen me could, likely be watching this tonite. Check out the NPR spot on this story here.

juju trusts jonny...

but juju's been kind of a fan of J.S. for some while (see the olde posts @ d'monkey circa december '03 -- specifically the 12.23 post -- and february '02). Anyways, the NYT posits the question Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America (quite the coincidence: writing this post whilst watching Inside Washington and hearing Nina Totenberg make pointed J. Stewart reference...).

Tsuwarmi

Nod nod wink wink, my journeying postbuddy. Higher ground.

back from something slightly resembling a vacation...

some pleasant hours spent in the Santa Cruz & Monterey environs, but me back at chez juju now. Ourowndarnedself caught a couple of very interesting interviews on the tube that we recommend to thee, hope you have opportunity to view them both, perhaps choosing to seek out the books mentioned in the interviews.

First, from Charlie Rose, an interview with Philip Gourevitch alongside one viewed only minutes ago whilst watching Bill Moyers Journal,
an interview with Andrew J. Bacevich.
Via Tom Dispatch, this extra added bonus, penned by Andrew J. Bacevich, Is Perpetual War Our Future.

Logo a go-go!

So, I'm staring into the freezer at a bag of frozen french fries when it occurs to me that John McCain's campaign logo looks a lot like the McCain's Frozen Food logo! But I'm clearly not the only one who's noticed. While searching around for a good example of the frozen food McCain logo, I found this discussion.

me llamo Dante Oblimov Hussein

See: Facebook users change middle names to Hussein in Obama solidarity protest. via techmeme.

Timothy

I've been re-reading "Timothy: or, Notes of an Abject Reptile," by Verlyn Klinkenborg. It's based on the observations of 18th century naturalist Gilbert White as recorded in his own, "The Natural History of Selbourne" and it's told from the point of view of Timothy, the (female) tortoise carried away from her home in the Greek isles by an English sailor, sold for half a crown on the docks of Chichester, and eventually settling in as a permanent resident of White's garden in Selbourne, England.

As caretaker of the enigmatic Ak (a Russian tortoise I purchased at the Petland Discount seven years ago for $40 US), certain passages of the book fill me with guilt. For example, Timothy describing the years spent confined in the brick-walled courtyard of her first mistress, Mrs. Rebecca Snooke.

Kin by close blood, Mrs. Rebecca Snooke. Mr. Gilbert White's father's sister. (So precise they are in the degrees of kinship!) And yet how these humans differ in appearance, compared to the resemblance of tortoises one to another, kin or no kin. Mr. Gilbert White was always struck by the fact that I recognized Mrs. Rebecca Snooke.

She comes into the courtyard waving a lettuce-leaf.

Calling from on high, "Timothy! Timothy!"

Who else could it have been? In forty years only a few humans ever entered that courtyard. Gardeners, maids, young Whites, select friends, Mr. Manning, the doctor. Each one as different as a rook from a redbreast.

Was Mr. Gilbert White never struck by the fact that Mrs. Rebecca Snooke recognized me? If another of my kind had walked up to her on that pebbled path, could she have told the difference? Or would that tortoise have been Timothy too? She knew little enough about me in the end.

"I was much taken," Mr. Gilbert White wrote of me, "with its sagacity in discerning those that do it kind offices: for, as soon as the good old lady comes in sight who has waited on it for more than thirty years, it hobbles towards its benefactress with awkward alacrity; but remains inattentive to strangers. Thus not only 'the ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib,' but the most abject reptile and torpid of beings distinguishes the hand that feeds it, and is touched with the feelings of gratitude!"

Good old lady she was. Yet consider the levity, the dry prolixity, of Mr. Gilbert White's words. The casual human irony when talking about animals. "Awkward alacrity" -- "most abject reptile and torpid of beings" -- this I expect. "Ox" or "ass" I pass by, as I do "owner" and "master." Such words come naturally to humans. Students of property as well as kinship. Kinship a property in each other.

But place Mrs. Rebecca Snooke in a brick box apart from her natural kind. Where she cannot eat her natural food or dig her natural bed. Let her be fed twice a day, albeit cheerfully, by one who keeps her there. Be kind and withhold the drowning rains, the killing frosts. Year after year for forty years. Would she say she has been waited on? Or would another word occur to her?

Cliff Bolling, you da man!

Wired article (via slashdot) re Cliff Bolling and his digitizing of 78s. The article title, by the by, is misleading unless all of Bolling's 78's are from the late 40's and the 50's. Otherwise it's shellac, man, not vinyl.

Having a cellar of our own with a couple thousand hand picked 78s, and knowing how long this all takes, we salute you, Cliff!

(oh! And a few hours later it looks like you've been cut off by Yahoo!)

Old sheets

The moustache makes him look less elite, no? And for Juju it's All Aboard for Monkey Town and Monkey Doodle Doo. Thank you Lester S. Levy & Johns Hopkins.

Bike polo

Met a couple of bike polo players Saturday. Gwah! Where have I been? Gonna try to get down to Broome & Christie one soon Sunday to check it out.

Oh, my God, he won't shut up and now he's going to tell you who they've seen perform recently

Ghostland Observatory. Later that night I got drunk and made Lori promise that if I found out I only had one year to live, I would not have to see G.O. more than once in that year. Or maybe I didn't get drunk. But I definitely made her promise.

Richie Havens in the most idyllic setting under the trees in a Metrotech courtyard as the final show in this year's BAM Metrotech rhythm & blues series. Rode i.i. there at met L @ lunchtime. Told nice stories, some rooted in his growing up in nearby Bed Sty. Produced, as is the whole series, by friend Danny Kapilian. (Lots of RH on youtube. )

Lila Downs. Wow! Double-wow! Ten seconds into her show you are totally with her. Amazing to see someone so forceful, political, slipping in and out of contemporary and folks genres and never sensing a line between the two. Minimum Wage and La Cucaracha were standouts for me. En el norte vive Villa / En el sur vive Zapata... and the crowd roars. And, Cumbia de Mole.

Chocolate Emitt Rhodes

There's a Christopher Norman storefront tucked into 60 New Street, which has become (the street, not the shop) something of a war zone of construction and car-traps leading to the back of the NYSE and is one of the few streets in Manhattan where the little google man refuses to show you a street-level view. They have a beautiful little Faema - I think an e61 - on which they make one of the best and most reliable espresso I know. And it's a buck. Plus $0.0825. And the guy who usually mans the shop is great, knows lots of regulars, and is always playing music worth listening to.

Last week I was in there and I'm listening and listening and I'm thinking, I know who that is, who is that? It's Emitt Rhodes! Poppy as all get-out and as great as it sounded back in, uh, 1970.

Bike Commuters - you've come a long way now, Baby..

Have stumbled upon Bike Commuters, via gizmodo's linking to the plastic bike article. (Uh..., and others.)

a little about ebook physical feedback and a little about work

So, like I said, I'm plowing into Underworld, which is a mighty thick book, but I'm doing it on my Kindle and even though there are those little progress dots along the bottom of the screen, I don't have any real sense of where I am in the physical book, and somehow I really need to know. I feel a little fidgety not knowing. So I dug up a paperback copy and skimmed through and, ahhh, there I am, on page 110. A bazillion pages left to go. I feel better. Tap. Tap.

There's so much in Underworld about working. To whit:

I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions. Did I do this myself? You maintain a shifting distance between yourself and your job. There's a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not you that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.

Do I do this myself?

ten years ago...

yourstruly first became familiar with ms. james during the Mood Indigo years, we even exchanged notes oncet upon a time, and methinks the subject of the notes was March Madness related (ms. james was a hoopster herowndarnedself during her college years) -- ANYWAY...
happy 10 year anniversary Ms. James!
think back to where you were on this day 10-years ago and where you are in your life now. Are you any different? Do you have any regrets? If you got a do over, would you make the same choices?
damn, feelin' a decided lack of courage in revisiting that time in mine own life 10 years previous...

Jedgar

Two small coincidences yesterday.

I finished reading Benjamin Black's The Lemur, and started Don Delillo's Underworld. And there was J. Edgar Hoover in both of them. As the likely murderer of a CIA big in the first, and as the fourth amigo in the box (with Sinatra, Gleason and Toots Shor) at the Bobby Thompson game three of the Dodgers Giants playoff.

And where was I reading Underworld and what happened? In the lou, just off our kitchen, when at exactly 6 o'clock ante meridian, the coffee maker turned on and it started raining hard outside, the glurgy-poppy sound of the maker and the sussuruss of the rain mixing together all at once. But, you know, something didn't seem right, something I half remembered, and a few minutes later I went checking clocks and it turns out that the timer on the coffee maker was 6 minutes fast. So it all happened at 5:54, which somehow then seemed a little less special. And the rain stopped.

But 3:58 PM remains an interesting time for older New Yorkers.

no, yourstruly not at all sure he likes this...

a "people search engine" by the name of spock has come across our radar; ourowndarnedself input one of the many nom de plumes used over the years when posting at d'monkey, lo and behold, there were recognizeable results, which became even more distressing when juju pongo used his alias within...

Patti Smith...

nyt review of Dream of Life;
mo' 'bout that here...
juju is big admirer of Patti Smith...

'ittle 'ikey, 'ttle 'ikey, oh oh oh

Seems to me I've mentioned 'ittle 'ikey a number of times but never thought to make a full introduction. That's the darlin' at rest, over there. At some point after I started riding half way to work I decided that having a bike I could bring onto the subway would be a good thing for a little extra mobility & flexibility. I looked around at the usual suspects (Dahon - nyah, Brompton - I regularly hit potholes bigger than it's tires, BikeFriday - I'm not fancy enough).

Then! I ran across swift folder references on the web, was really excited to see that here at the center of the universe they are sold through Recycle-A-Bicycle, subwayed myself down to dumbo, found 'ittle 'ikey, went for a couple of spins, and low and behold rode myself home.

So, on this last trip of ours, I not only brought a uke, I also brought my bike. Fits nicely in a Mini, by the by. Now 'ittle 'ikey knows the pleasure of having biked across Shelter Island from Crescent Beach to that last cluster of hillocks into Wade's beach at 10 in the morning mid-week in the height of summer, swoosh into the carless lot, hot as a dog & panting for cool, clear water. (Water.)


View Larger Map

And then it came rushing out in one humongous spunk

Have always wanted to take our NY / Conn suburban nephews and niece to things out of their ordinary - looks like we may get to take two of them (and their mom. Sissy K) to the Hal Willner Keep A Light in the Window: An Homage to Joel Dorn thang at Lincoln Center.


Tried to post this next from the thingy on the 31st, but it went awry:

Well, I really don't know what this means...
but I gather that Garrett is a local musician here in Greenport (across the water from Shelter Island, where we've been these last few days). The sign is in Aldo's window. Do you know Aldo Maiorana? We met him only once, a year or two ago in his last shop here, where I had one of the two or three best espresso's I've ever had. We bought some beans there, and Aldo, who roasts them, got all excited and opened the bag and wanted us to look at the beans we were buying, really look at them, and smell them. Anyway, since then a Starbucks has moved into town, Aldo has consolidated into one shop, almost across from the borg, and the pictured sign is in his window. Matt, the barkeep at the Frisky Oyster, is the one who told us that the Garrett is etc. All other meanings are elusive. Matt also told us that the Fifth Season moved from Greenport to Port Jeff because the town wouldn't let them add a second floor for more seating so the could make their nut and profit. This in a town that could use more successful local businesses. Instead there's now a Starbucks. A wella wella wella. Back to 'ittle 'ikey and the water. Ciao.

Two days before that, I meant to say:
Weather threatening all day, swinging between quiet and monster storm, energy up and down and all over the place. Headed late morning over to the infamous flea in Fort Green (and the NYT article here) - started pouring just as we got there, but let up enough for us to get totally mesmerized at the kimchi lady's booth (and buy some for later) and at the folks who were making sandwiches of local fresh ricotta, basil, salami and - your choice - peach or raspberry jam (and, yeah, we bought a couple of those, too).

linky bits from the NYT...

if anyone was curious to examine old d'monkey for evidence, that capitalization of "I" (wondering oftentimes if something similar went on in other languages) was something myowndarnedself always had some issue with, notwithstanding our (there it goes again) long established habit of using the "imperial we", iffenyeknowwhutimean...

why we capitalize the word "I";

then, review of book subject of which is truly a modern marvel;

not sure if yourstruly has much else to offer at this time, and no, still haven't made that field trip to the ice cream emporium mentioned in post sometime previously, but soon as we do, you will know about it. Ciao!

much later that same day...
thou shouldst drop in on mine old pal (and one time partner in misery at the SF Chroni-Fishwrap-cle), lee s., wizard behind the curtain at the skirblog...